Alabama Shakes and the Crisis of the American Dream

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Alabama Shakes’ return after nearly a decade has prompted the mainstream press to respond with its usual blend of breathless anticipation and superficial speculation. Much of the coverage falls back on familiar clichés about “nostalgia,” “reunion energy,” and the band “returning to what they do best.” Repeated across the music press, these phrases say less about Alabama Shakes than about the intellectual limits of contemporary cultural criticism.

A serious assessment must begin with the conditions surrounding this reunion. In 2026, the United States is marked by deep inequality, political instability, and cultural confusion. The “American Dream,” invoked in the band’s lead single, is not simply a poetic image but a historically specific ideology whose failure is now widely recognised. The gap between the promise of upward mobility and the reality of widespread insecurity forms the backdrop to nearly all serious art today, and Alabama Shakes’ return is no exception.

Alabama Shakes, the “American Dream,” and the Cultural Opposition to Authoritarianism

The lack of any direct clash between Alabama Shakes and the current fascists in the White House — no stage denunciation, no Truth Social outburst, no headline-making confrontation — is telling. It does not suggest political neutrality, but points to a deeper feature of the present: artists are being pulled into political conflict less through personal disputes than through the objective pressures of social life. The band’s 2025–26 return comes at a moment when cultural expression can no longer be separated from the political regime. That is the context in which their new work must be understood.

Alabama Shakes fell silent in 2018, during the second year of Trump’s first term. Their 2025–26 return comes under markedly different conditions. The administration’s authoritarian course — attacks on democratic rights, incitement against political opponents, and the concentration of executive power — has created a climate in which artists, writers, and performers increasingly feel compelled to respond.

As cultural critic David Walsh noted earlier this year, this growing resistance “is beginning to find many important expressions, including among classical and popular musicians, actors, writers and even professional athletes.” Bruce Springsteen, Philip Glass, Renée Fleming, and Lucinda Williams have already taken public stands, while Trump’s rhetoric toward dissenting artists has become increasingly hostile. Alabama Shakes has not been directly involved in these confrontations, but its silence should not be confused with political absence.

The Political Weight of the Band’s Existence

The band’s significance does not depend on overt political statements. Brittany Howard — a Black, queer woman from Alabama — leads a group grounded in Black Southern musical traditions: soul, blues, gospel, and R&B. These forms grew out of histories of oppression and resistance and remain inseparable from the struggles of working-class and oppressed people in the Deep South. As a critically acclaimed, Black-led rock band from Alabama, Alabama Shakes carries political weight in a period of reactionary nationalism and racial incitement. This is not identity politics, but historical fact: American popular music, at its most authentic, has long expressed the experience of those subjected to exploitation and injustice. To work seriously within that tradition is itself a challenge to the ideological foundations of authoritarianism. The single “American Dream” sharpens this point. Its title rejects the myth of national health and upward mobility, making it anything but a neutral artistic gesture in 2026.

The Limits and Contradictions of Artistic Opposition

The limits of artistic resistance must also be acknowledged. The WSWS has repeatedly observed that, although more artists are prepared to speak out, political confusion remains the dominant tendency. Many recognise that something is deeply wrong, but lack a coherent framework for understanding its causes or how it might be overcome.

This contradiction is evident in the emotional structure of I Must Be Dreaming. Its movement between exhaustion and wonder — between despair and the search for beauty — is more than an aesthetic choice. It expresses the condition of artists who oppose authoritarianism but remain confined by the ideology of the existing social order. They reject the symptoms without yet grasping the underlying disease. This is not a criticism of Alabama Shakes, but a description of the artistic milieu’s broader political limitations.

The Real Question

The central issue is not whether Alabama Shakes will directly “take on Trump.” The more important question is whether their music can contribute, even indirectly, to a broader cultural shift in which the working class becomes conscious of its own power. Will I Must Be Dreaming remain a beautifully realised portrait of distress, capturing individuals trying to make sense of a collapsing social order? Or will it achieve something rarer: a clarity that cuts through the ideological fog and points, however tentatively, beyond the limits of the present?

The band’s history shows a capacity for seriousness, honesty, and artistic courage, though whether this will develop into more than emotional testimony remains uncertain. Their re-emergence is not simply an effort to recapture earlier success. Brittany Howard’s solo albums — Jaime (2019) and What Now (2024) — revealed a restless search for new forms, rhythms, and emotional registers. Far from side projects, they were necessary explorations that sharpened her artistic vocabulary and broadened the expressive range of her voice. The band’s decision to reunite after this development suggests not a retreat into the familiar, but a renewed effort to confront the contradictions of the present.

Producer Shawn Everett’s return underscores this development. Sound & Colour (2015) stood out among major-label releases of its era for resisting the flattened sound of commercial rock production. Everett preserved the band’s volatility — its sudden turns from quiet reflection to explosive force — without smoothing it into algorithmic uniformity. His involvement suggests a continued effort to push against the sonic limits of the streaming economy.

The Political Dimension: Mood as Symptom of Social Crisis

Reviewers have described “American Dream” as “political,” but usually in the loosest sense. Much contemporary music criticism treats politics as mood — a haze of “chaos,” “division,” or “uncertainty” — rather than as the outcome of concrete social forces. This is more than a methodological flaw; it reveals the ideological disorientation of a cultural layer that senses crisis but lacks the tools to explain it.

The album’s apparent movement between exhaustion and wonder, despair and longing, is more than an emotional palette. It reflects a society in which millions sense that something is deeply wrong but cannot yet articulate a coherent alternative. Artists, like workers, confront a system that promises opportunity while producing insecurity. In this context, the “American Dream” becomes both an object of desire and a symbol of betrayal.

Alabama Shakes are not presenting a political programme, nor should they be expected to. Their work instead captures, with unusual clarity, the emotional and ideological tensions of a society in crisis. The band’s return also reflects a music industry transformed over the past decade. Island Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group, operates in a system where streaming has devalued recorded music as a commodity, leaving albums to function chiefly as vehicles for touring, sync licensing, and catalogue valuation. With its critical reputation and cross-generational appeal, Alabama Shakes represents a substantial financial asset.

This does not diminish the artistic impulse behind the reunion. It does, however, place the band’s work within an industry increasingly organised around risk reduction and the monetisation of nostalgia. The tension between genuine artistic intent and commercial pressure is not unique to Alabama Shakes; it is a structural feature of cultural production under contemporary capitalism.

The Central Question: Clarity or Consolation

The question no preview can answer is whether the forthcoming album will simply combine the band’s earlier strengths — raw soul urgency and genre-crossing ambition — or reach for something harder: a clarity equal to the present moment. Can Alabama Shakes cut through the cultural fog of contemporary American life? Can they express, even indirectly, the contradictions of a society where hope endures after the collapse of the ideology that once sustained it? The early signs are encouraging, but the answer will only become clear when the full work is released.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources: Music, Statements, and Industry Materials

  • Alabama Shakes. Sound & Colour. ATO Records, 2015.
  • Alabama Shakes. I Must Be Dreaming (forthcoming). Island Records / Universal Music Group, 2026.
  • Howard, Brittany. Jaime. ATO Records, 2019.
  • Howard, Brittany. What Now. Island Records, 2024.
  • Island Records / Universal Music Group. Corporate filings, annual reports, and investor communications (2015–2025).
  • RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). “2024 Year‑End Music Industry Revenue Report.”
  • IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry). Global Music Report (2020–2025).
  • Spotify Technology S.A. “Loud & Clear: Streaming Revenue Transparency Reports” (2021–2025).

WSWS Cultural and Political Analysis

  • Walsh, David. “Artists Speak Out Against Authoritarianism and Attacks on Democratic Rights.” World Socialist Web Site, January 2026.
  • Walsh, David. “The Crisis of American Democracy and the Role of Culture.” WSWS, 2025.
  • Walsh, David. “The Political and Cultural Significance of Bruce Springsteen’s Opposition.” WSWS, 2024.
  • D’Angelo, Tom. “The Music Industry in the Age of Streaming: Profit, Precarity, and the Working Artist.” WSWS, 2023.
  • Greene, Joanne Laurier. “The Social Crisis and Contemporary American Art.” WSWS, 2022.
  • North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on Politics, Culture, and Class. Mehring Books, 2021.

Historical and Theoretical Works on Culture, Class, and Music

  • Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. University of California Press, 2002.
  • Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Schocken Books, 1968.
  • Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
  • Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. Back Bay Books, 1999.
  • Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. University of California Press, 1998.
  • Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz. Verso, 1998.
  • Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow, 1963.

Studies of the American South, Race, and Cultural Production

  • Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. Harper & Row, 1988.
  • Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press, 1955.
  • Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. Random House, 2008.
  • Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. LSU Press, 2008.

Music Industry Economics and Cultural Labour

  • Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. Sage, 2019.
  • Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. Routledge, 1999.
  • Meier, Leslie M. Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age. Polity, 2016.
  • Marshall, Lee. “The Rise of Catalogue Valuation in the Streaming Era.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2023.
  • Baym, Nancy. Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection. NYU Press, 2018.

Political Context and Authoritarianism

  • Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
  • Ziblatt, Daniel, et al. “Democratic Backsliding in the 21st Century.” Journal of Democracy, 2024.
  • American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Reports on civil liberties and executive power (2020–2025).
  • Human Rights Watch. World Report (2024–2026).

Press Coverage and Interviews

  • Rolling Stone. Coverage of Alabama Shakes (2012–2024).
  • Pitchfork. Reviews of Sound & Colour, Jaime, and What Now.
  • New York Times. Interviews with Brittany Howard (2019, 2024).
  • NPR Music. “Brittany Howard on Artistic Growth and Political Climate.” (2024).
  • Billboard. “UMG Strategy in the Streaming Economy.” (2023–2025).

Archival and Reference Sources

  • Library of Congress. American Folklife Centre archives on Southern musical traditions.
  • Smithsonian Folkways. Collections on blues, gospel, and R&B.
  • Oxford Music Online. Entries on soul, Southern rock, and contemporary American music.

Reclaiming Marx for the History of Slavery: A Review of David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

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For nearly two decades, debate over slavery and capitalism in the United States has been shaped by the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC), a loose group of scholars whose influence reflects less intellectual strength than the deep disorientation of contemporary bourgeois scholarship. Arising after the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of neoliberal triumphalism, the NHC has sought to offset its theoretical weakness through extensive empirical accumulation. Its central claim—that plantation slavery was integral to capitalist development—is correct, but it reaches that conclusion without grasping capitalism itself.

This is no accident. The NHC is a petty-bourgeois ideological formation rooted in academic middle layers whose outlook is marked by hostility to Marxism, suspicion of theory, and retreat into descriptive empiricism. Its scholars have produced vast archival detail yet remain unable to explain the structural relationship between slavery and capitalism. Their work reflects a wider crisis: the abandonment of historical materialism in the universities and the rise of identity politics, moralism, and methodological fragmentation.

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History enters at this moment of theoretical collapse. More than a contribution to slavery historiography, it directly challenges the petty-bourgeois drift of contemporary scholarship. It restores Marxist method to a field that has grown uncertain of its capacity to explain the world.

McNally counters long-standing caricatures by showing that Marx understood Atlantic plantation slavery as capitalist commodity production and the enslaved as a “chattel proletariat.” This is more than a small interpretive correction: it decisively refutes the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free wage labour, a view that obscures its global, violent, and coercive development.

The Argument: A Systematic Reassertion of Historical Materialism

McNally’s book proceeds in two parts. First, through case studies of Richard Ligon’s account of Barbadian sugar production, George Washington’s role as an agrarian capitalist slaveholder, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonial labour, it shows that plantation slavery bore the defining marks of capitalist production: production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, and constant pressure to raise productivity.

The second part shifts to political economy, showing how capital derived from slavery helped shape modern financial institutions, including the Bank of England, and later influenced the development of American capitalism. The conclusion is clear: slavery was not outside capitalism but structurally central to it.

McNally places his work within a “forgotten critical Marxist tradition” of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, all of whom rejected the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free labour. By reviving this tradition, he exposes the NHC’s theoretical bankruptcy: its attempt to explain capitalism without Marx and slavery without class analysis.

Where the Book Succeeds: Restoring Class Struggle to the Centre of the Narrative

The book’s strongest contribution is its analysis of enslaved resistance. Liberal historiography has often reduced rebellion, sabotage, and flight to moral testimony or narrative detail. Despite its empirical breadth, the NHC largely repeats this pattern, treating enslaved resistance as an outside disruption rather than a structural feature of capitalist production.

McNally breaks sharply with this approach by recasting enslaved resistance as labour struggle, structurally comparable to strikes, slowdowns, and collective bargaining. In doing so, he restores the enslaved to their proper place as historical agents contesting the conditions of production and reproduction. This is a genuinely original contribution that gives his theoretical framework real explanatory force. His prose is clear, forceful, and historically grounded; planter diaries, travel accounts, and slave narratives function not as ornament but as evidence of the lived reality of capitalist exploitation.

David McNally and the 1619 Project: Marxism Against the Petty‑Bourgeois Rewriting of History

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History appears at a moment of profound ideological confusion. Few examples reveal this more clearly than the rise of the 1619 Project, a political and cultural intervention embraced by parts of the media and academia as a definitive reframing of American history. In fact, it marks the culmination of a petty-bourgeois ideological turn: replacing historical materialism with racial essentialism, class analysis with moral narrative, and revolutionary perspective with political demoralisation.

Although not written as a direct reply to the 1619 Project, McNally’s book stands in sharp theoretical opposition to it. While the 1619 Project casts slavery as a story of racial continuity and national guilt, McNally emphasises the structural, global, and capitalist character of New World slavery. Rather than treating slavery as the permanent essence of American society, he locates it within the development of the capitalist mode of production—a system driven not by racial metaphysics but by profit, accumulation, and class domination. The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The 1619 Project: A Petty‑Bourgeois Politics of Race

The 1619 Project is not a serious historical intervention but a political project grounded in the outlook of the upper-middle-class layers that dominate contemporary cultural institutions. Its method replaces historical materialism with racial essentialism, presenting American history as an unbroken chain of racial oppression from the arrival of enslaved Africans to the present. This narrative serves clear ideological functions: it collapses class into race, erasing capitalist exploitation; substitutes moral condemnation for structural analysis, reducing history to a record of injustice rather than social forces; denies the revolutionary agency of the working class by portraying American society as permanently defined by racial hierarchy rather than class struggle; and aligns with the interests of affluent professional strata, who use racial discourse to claim moral authority while preserving their own class position.

The 1619 Project’s hostility to Marxism is deliberate. It reflects the political needs of a social layer threatened by genuine materialist analysis, which would expose the class basis of exploitation and the capitalist state’s role in sustaining inequality.

McNally’s Intervention: Restoring Marxism to the Debate

McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism directly challenges this ideological drift. His claim is not merely that slavery was linked to capitalism, a point the 1619 Project acknowledges only superficially, but that slavery was a form of capitalist production governed by the same structural imperatives that shaped wage labour. This distinction is decisive. Where the 1619 Project treats slavery primarily as a racial institution, McNally shows it was a capitalist institution driven by production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, relentless pressure to raise productivity, and integration into global circuits of finance and credit. By recovering Marx’s writings and the tradition of Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, McNally exposes the theoretical bankruptcy of approaches that reduce slavery to racial essence rather than analysing it as a capitalist relation.

Enslaved Resistance: Class Struggle, Not Racial Allegory

One of McNally’s key contributions is to recast enslaved resistance as labour struggle. This sharply contrasts with the 1619 Project, which presents resistance mainly as racial testimony: a moral counter-narrative rather than a structural feature of capitalist production. McNally instead restores the enslaved as historical agents engaged in class struggle, contesting the conditions of production and reproduction within capitalism. This is a fundamentally Marxist insight, and it is absent from the 1619 Project’s racial-moral framework.

Why the 1619 Project Cannot Explain Slavery

The 1619 Project cannot explain slavery because it cannot explain capitalism. Its framework is moral rather than material, racial rather than structural. It presents slavery as America’s original sin, not as a global capitalist institution embedded in world markets, finance, and imperial expansion. McNally, by contrast, shows that slavery was not an aberration but a central mechanism of capitalist accumulation; that the enslaved were not racial symbols but workers subjected to capitalist discipline; that the plantation was not simply a racial institution but a capitalist factory in the fields; and that resistance was not merely racial defiance but class struggle within a coercive labour regime. In short, McNally explains slavery because he explains capitalism; the 1619 Project explains neither.

Marxism Against Petty‑Bourgeois Revisionism

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is more than a scholarly study; it is a necessary intervention in a historiographical field shaped by petty-bourgeois racial politics and theoretical fragmentation. Despite its cultural influence, the 1619 Project retreats from materialist analysis, recasting the history of slavery as a narrative of racial permanence. McNally’s book restores what that project cannot: the structural, global, and capitalist character of slavery; the agency of enslaved workers as participants in class struggle; and the indispensable role of Marxist theory in explaining the modern world’s development.

Where It Meets Resistance: The Petty‑Bourgeois Fear of Theory

The sharpest critique of McNally comes from a review in the Journal of Social History, which objects that McNally is engaged in theoretical reconstruction rather than conventional archival history. This criticism is revealing. It reflects the methodological conservatism of contemporary academic history, which has increasingly abandoned theory in favour of empiricism and treats conceptual clarity as a threat rather than a necessity.

The objection that “historians and theorists do different kinds of work” is not a methodological point but an ideological one. It expresses the petty‑bourgeois fear of totalising explanation — the fear that a coherent analysis of capitalism might expose the social foundations of exploitation and the class character of the academy itself.

The NHC’s refusal to engage with Marx is not an oversight. It is a political stance. It reflects the ideological position of a stratum that seeks to critique capitalism’s excesses while preserving its foundations, and that therefore cannot tolerate a genuinely materialist analysis.

McNally’s insistence on theoretical coherence is therefore not a flaw but a strength. It is a challenge to a historiographical field that has retreated from explanation into description and from analysis into moralism.

A Necessary Marxist Intervention in a Field Adrift

Slavery and Capitalism is not a conventional historical monograph. It is a theoretically ambitious and politically necessary intervention into a debate dominated by empiricism, identity politics, and methodological fragmentation. McNally demonstrates that Marx’s framework, properly understood, already contains the tools needed to explain the relationship between slavery and capitalism — tools the NHC has lacked and attempted to replace with descriptive accumulation.

Whether or not one accepts McNally’s full theoretical argument, his reframing of enslaved resistance as labour struggle is a major contribution. His recovery of a critical Marxist tradition is timely and essential. And his critique of the NHC exposes the limits of a historiography that has attempted to understand capitalism without Marx.

For scholars engaged in the debate over slavery and capitalism, McNally’s book is a serious, provocative, and necessary work — one that restores historical materialism to a field that has drifted far from it.

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History was published by the University of California Press in September 2025.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Works by David McNally

  • McNally, David. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025.
  • McNally, David. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.
  • McNally, David. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso, 1993.
  • McNally, David. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Ideology and Politics. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.

II. Marx, Engels, and the Classical Marxist Tradition

  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume II. London: Penguin, 1978.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin, 1981.
  • Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1973.
  • Marx, Karl. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
  • Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004.
  • Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

III. The Critical Black Marxist Tradition (Du Bois, James, Wynter)

  • Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998 (orig. 1935).
  • Du Bois, W.E.B. The World and Africa. New York: Viking, 1947.
  • James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989 (orig. 1938).
  • James, C.L.R. A History of Pan-African Revolt. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1969.
  • Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
  • Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102.

IV. The New History of Capitalism (NHC)

Core Works

  • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
  • Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
  • Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
  • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
  • Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Representative Articles

  • Rockman, Seth. “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (2016): 335–350.
  • Beckert, Sven. “History of American Capitalism.” In Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by Louis Cain et al., 1–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

V. The 1619 Project

Primary Texts

  • Hannah‑Jones, Nikole, ed. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021.
  • The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. Special Issue, August 18, 2019.

Key Essays (Original Magazine Issue)

  • Hannah‑Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written.”
  • Desmond, Matthew. “To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.”
  • Kendi, Ibram X. “The Anti‑Blackness of American Democracy.”
  • Berry, Mary Frances. “How Segregation Shaped American Education.”

VI. Critiques of the 1619 Project

Marxist and Materialist Critiques

  • Reed, Adolph. “The 1619 Project and the Racialization of Everything.” Catalyst 3, no. 4 (2020): 1–20.
  • Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, February 2020.
  • WSWS Editorial Board. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of History.” World Socialist Web Site, September 2019.
  • North, David. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.

Academic Critiques

  • Wilentz, Sean. “A Matter of Facts.” The Atlantic, January 2020.
  • Oakes, James. “The 1619 Project and the Origins of the Civil War.” Catalyst 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–30.
  • McPherson, James M. Interview in WSWS, November 2019.
  • Bynum, Victoria. “The 1619 Project and the Problem of Historical Truth.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 2020.

VII. Slavery, Capitalism, and Political Economy (General Scholarship)

  • Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
  • Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997.
  • Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London: Verso, 2011.
  • Tomich, Dale. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labour, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
  • Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Race in the Twenty‑First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
  • Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
  • Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

VIII. Political Economy, Finance, and Empire

  • Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
  • Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1968.
  • Inikori, Joseph. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

IX. Useful Archival and Primary Sources

  • Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1657.
  • Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A View of the Art of Colonisation. London: Parker, 1849.
  • Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
  • Slave Narratives (WPA Federal Writers’ Project), Library of Congress.

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery: A Materialist Reckoning with Abolition’s Sanitized Myth

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Eighty years after its publication, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) remains one of the few works of historical scholarship that a socialist reader can approach without performing the usual surgery of extracting a materialist core from an idealist narrative. Williams — a Trinidadian historian trained at Oxford and later the first prime minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago — set out to dismantle one of British liberalism’s most cherished myths: that abolition was the triumph of moral conscience over economic interest. His achievement was not merely to expose the hypocrisy of this narrative, but to relocate abolition squarely within the history of capital accumulation.

Williams develops his argument in two parts: slavery as the engine of British capitalism’s rise, and abolition as capitalism’s rational response once slavery no longer served its interests. A deeper Marxist reading reinforces both claims by placing them within the frameworks of primitive accumulation, formal and real subsumption, and the dialectic of economic crisis and political action — concepts Williams approached but did not fully develop.

Slavery as Primitive Accumulation: Capital’s Violent Foundation

Williams’ first claim — that slavery financed the rise of British capitalism — is now widely accepted, though often detached from its theoretical force. His point was not merely that Britain profited from slavery, but that the plantation complex formed a stage of primitive accumulation (Marx 1976, 873–940): capital’s violent pre-history, in which wealth was extracted through extra-economic coercion. The Caribbean plantation was a modern capitalist enterprise under conditions of formal subsumption: capital controlled the labour process without yet transforming it. Surplus was extracted through the whip, the chain, and the legal fiction of human property. Slavery was therefore indispensable to early British capitalism because it generated enormous coerced surplus, supplied capital for industrial investment, and integrated Britain into a global commercial system whose profits exceeded those of domestic production.

Williams documented this with a precision few historians have matched, drawing on shipping records, customs ledgers, and parliamentary debates (Williams 1944, 51–78). The result was a portrait of a capitalist system whose industrial future was financed by the blood and labour of enslaved Africans.

Abolition as Capitalist Rationalization: When Slavery Became a Barrier

Williams’ second claim — that capitalism discarded slavery once it was no longer profitable — remains contested. A Marxist framework, however, sharpens his argument. By the early nineteenth century, the plantation system faced structural crisis: exhausted soil depressed yields (Beckles 2013), protected monopolies clashed with free-trade ideology (Ragatz 1928), industrial capital required mobile wage labour rather than fixed chattel (Engels 1845), and the Haitian Revolution greatly increased the costs of military repression (Dubois 2004).

Slavery had become a barrier to capital’s shift from formal to real subsumption: from extracting surplus through direct coercion to extracting it through wages, machinery, and rising productivity (Marx 1976, 1019–1038). Abolition was not capitalism’s redemption, but its modernization.

Williams came close to this conclusion but never fully stated it: abolition marked the shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism, from plantation extraction to factory exploitation. The form of domination changed, but domination itself remained.

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery and the 1619 Project

Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944) has returned to public debate in recent years, partly because of its 2022 republication as a Penguin Modern Classic and partly because controversies around the New York Times’ 1619 Project have revived questions about slavery, capitalism, and the origins of the modern world. Williams’ thesis — that slavery built British capitalism, and that capitalism abandoned slavery only when it was no longer profitable — speaks directly to the 1619 Project’s central claims, even though the two works differ in method, scope, and political purpose.

Williams’ Thesis: Slavery as Engine and Obstacle of Capitalism

Williams’ argument has two parts. First, he shows that the profits of Caribbean slavery financed Britain’s commercial and industrial expansion, supporting port cities, banks, and the early industrial revolution (Williams 1944; Project MUSE summary). Second, he argues that British capitalism opposed slavery only when the plantation system began to obstruct further accumulation. Abolition, in this account, was not a moral awakening but a rationalization of capital.

Williams’ thesis broke with the liberal historiography that had long dominated Anglo-Caribbean history and helped open the way for a generation of West Indian scholars and anti-colonial thinkers (Marshall 1991; JSTOR summary). As the Royal Historical Society observes, it remains “perhaps the most influential book written in the twentieth century on the history of slavery” (RHS panel summary).

II. The 1619 Project: Slavery as America’s Foundational Structure

The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in 2019, makes a related but distinct argument: that slavery fundamentally shaped the United States, and that 1619 — when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia — should be understood as the nation’s true founding. Its essays contend that American capitalism, political institutions, racial ideology, and democratic contradictions cannot be understood without placing slavery at the centre. While Williams focuses on Britain and the Caribbean, the 1619 Project centres the United States. While Williams writes as an economic historian dismantling imperial self-mythology, the 1619 Project intervenes journalistically and politically to reshape national memory. Both, however, share a core premise: slavery was not an aberration within capitalism, but one of its constitutive foundations.

Williams argues that slavery financed Britain’s industrial revolution; the 1619 Project argues that slavery shaped the distinctive features of American capitalism, including labour discipline, financial instruments, and racialized class relations. Both reject the idea that capitalism and slavery were opposites, insisting instead that capitalism developed through slavery. For Williams, plantations were capitalist enterprises driven by profit, not feudal remnants. The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, presenting plantation accounting systems, productivity metrics, and coercive labour management as precursors to modern corporate practice.

Williams showed that British humanitarianism closely tracked changing economic interests, while the 1619 Project argues that American ideals of freedom and democracy rested on the material foundation of racial slavery. In both accounts, morality follows interest, not the reverse. Williams grounds his analysis in trade statistics, shipping records, and economic logic; his critics argue that he underplays enslaved resistance and political mobilization (Drescher 2010). The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds culture, ideology, politics, memory, identity, and national mythmaking.

Williams writes from the Caribbean, analysing Britain’s imperial economy. The 1619 Project writes from within the United States, confronting the legacy of slavery in American institutions. Williams dismantles imperial self‑congratulation; the 1619 Project dismantles nationalist self‑congratulation.

Williams wrote during the age of anti-colonial nationalism, providing intellectual support for independence movements (JSTOR summary). The 1619 Project intervenes in a moment of racial reckoning, political polarization, and debate over structural racism in the United States. Their strongest point of convergence — and where Williams offers the sharper materialist insight — is abolition. For Williams, abolition was not capitalism’s moral triumph but its transition from one mode of exploitation to another: mature industrial capitalism required wage labour rather than chattel labour, free trade rather than protected monopolies, and flexible labour markets rather than fixed human property.

Williams underplays enslaved resistance — revolts, sabotage, flight, and the Haitian Revolution — as material forces that shaped slavery’s profitability. The 1619 Project, by contrast, foregrounds enslaved people as historical agents whose struggles helped shape American democracy. In this respect, it corrects a genuine limitation in Williams’ account. It also examines slavery’s ideological afterlife, showing how racial capitalism persists in policing, housing, healthcare, and labour markets — dimensions Williams did not address.

Despite their differences, Williams and the 1619 Project share a central claim: slavery was not an external stain on capitalism but one of its formative structures. Williams demonstrates this through economic history; the 1619 Project does so through national memory and institutional analysis. Both challenge liberal narratives that portray slavery as a regrettable departure from Western progress, insisting instead that capitalism’s history cannot be told without placing slavery at its centre.

The Enslaved as Historical Agents: The Material Force Williams Underplayed

Critics often argue that Williams underplays the agency of the enslaved (Drescher 2010). This criticism is valid, but often misdirected. The problem is not that Williams failed to “give voice” to enslaved people; it is that he understated their role as material actors who shaped the profitability of slavery itself. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was decisive.

The Haitian Revolution showed that enslaved labour was not passive raw material but a revolutionary force capable of destroying the plantation system itself. After Haiti, the costs of maintaining slavery rose sharply; fear of revolt became a constant factor in economic calculation; and the British state faced the prospect of repeated military intervention to defend planter property. Enslaved resistance — through revolts, slowdowns, sabotage, and flight — was not merely a moral drama, but a material pressure that made slavery increasingly untenable. Later Marxist scholarship has developed the analysis Williams left implicit (Blackburn 1988; James 1938).

Williams has been criticised for moving too quickly from economic crisis to political outcome, but this misreads the relation between economics and politics under capitalism. Mass petitions, abolitionist agitation, parliamentary debates, and enslaved uprisings were not moral forces set against economic ones; they were the forms through which economic necessity became political action.

Capital does not act on its own. It moves through parties, movements, ideologies, and crises. The political history missing from Williams is therefore not an alternative to economic explanation, but the mechanism by which economic imperatives became policy.

Williams wrote in the 1930s and 1940s as a colonial subject, before the global Marxist revival and before the full publication of Marx’s economic manuscripts. Capitalism and Slavery was an anti-colonial intervention aimed at exposing British hypocrisy, not a systematic Marxist theory of capitalist development. What Williams could not fully state — but what a Marxist reading must — is that the same British capital that abandoned chattel slavery in the 1830s was, within a generation, extracting surplus value from wage labour under conditions Engels described as “social murder” (Engels 1845, 109). Abolition was not the victory of conscience, but the victory of industrial capital.

Why Williams Still Matters: The Ideology of Humanitarianism Today

Williams’ method remains indispensable because it exposes the material interests beneath contemporary ideology: “humanitarian intervention” conceals geopolitical strategy; “anti-corruption reform” advances market liberalization; and “corporate diversity” can mask labour discipline and brand management. The pattern remains the same: morality follows interest, not the other way round. Williams’ central lesson — that ruling-class morality discovers itself in line with ruling-class interest — has lost none of its force.

Williams’ book remains indispensable precisely because it refuses the liberal fantasy of moral progress and insists that the history of abolition, like the history of capitalism itself, can only be understood through the logic of material interests.

Bibliography

Primary Works

  • Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
  • James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
  • Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Secondary Works

  • Beckles, Hilary McD. Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2013.
  • Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso, 1988.
  • Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
  • Ragatz, Lowell J. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833. New York: Century, 1928.

A review of Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism

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The Last Dons: The Collapse of Britain’s Bourgeois Intellectual Establishment

At its core, Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons examines the terminal decline of a ruling-class intelligentsia. The “golden age” of Oxbridge dons was less a period of democratic intellectual flourishing than the final moment when a small academic elite exercised ideological authority on behalf of the British bourgeoisie. Although Kidd writes with affection for his subjects, his book inadvertently exposes the exhaustion of an entire social order and the inability of its intellectual representatives to understand the forces that displaced them.

A wartime bureaucracy becomes an ideological caste

Kidd’s central historical claim—that Oxbridge intellectuals rose to postwar prominence because of the Second World War—is wholly persuasive. Returning from Bletchley Park, Whitehall, and the intelligence services, these dons did not simply resume academic life; they were drawn into the machinery of the state. Their authority depended less on public engagement or democratic legitimacy than on Britain’s distinctive culture of elite deference.

This intelligentsia functioned as a manager of ideology. Figures such as Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor‑Roper, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Edmund Leach were not detached from power; they helped justify it. The debates, rivalries, and feuds Kidd recounts with relish were the internal dramas of a caste whose role was to stabilise bourgeois rule after war and empire.

The tremors of crisis

Kidd’s narrative of the 1960s and 1970s is revealing. The student protests, curricular battles, and increasingly parochial academic disputes were not merely cultural episodes. They were symptoms of a deeper crisis: the erosion of the ideological authority of the bourgeois academy.

For the first time, the dons had to justify their role. The old assumptions—that Oxbridge defined national culture and that its professors naturally guided public life—began to collapse. Kidd presents these disturbances as early signs of Thatcherism, but they were better understood as expressions of the global capitalist crisis of the late 1960s, which shook the institutions built on postwar stability.

Kidd’s most striking insight—and the one closest to a Marxist reading—is that the dons were not overthrown by radical students or left-wing agitation, but by the right.

Thatcher’s government, serving finance capital and an assertive new managerial class, saw Oxbridge’s intellectual aristocracy as an obstacle to market discipline. Long accustomed to acting as an unelected arm of the state, the dons suddenly appeared as inefficient remnants of a paternalistic order the ruling class no longer required. The irony is central: the bourgeois intelligentsia was dismantled by the very class it had served. Thatcherism did not simply reform the universities; it destroyed the social foundations that had sustained Oxbridge’s ideological authority for decades.

Elegy from inside the citadel

Kidd’s account is intimate and nostalgic, as might be expected from a former Fellow of All Souls. It is richly detailed, but also limited by a key blindness: he laments the disappearance of an elite without fully examining the class relations that sustained it. The dons’ authority was never democratic; it rested on Britain’s rigid social hierarchy. Their decline was therefore not a cultural tragedy, but a sign of the wider decay of bourgeois intellectual life.

Why the book matters now

The significance of Twilight of the Dons lies not in its nostalgia, but in its unintended warning. The forces that dismantled the Oxbridge establishment—marketisation, managerialism, and austerity—now weigh on the entire university system. Today’s academic, deprived of autonomy and governed by bureaucratic metrics, is less the heir to Berlin or Trevor‑Roper than another casualty of the forces that displaced them.

Hugh Trevor‑Roper: The Bourgeois Historian as Court Intellectual

Hugh Trevor‑Roper is central to Colin Kidd’s Twilight of the Dons because he so clearly embodies the contradictions of the postwar Oxbridge intellectual caste. His career shows how the British ruling class depended on a narrow elite of academics to give its authority ideological coherence—and how that elite ultimately failed to grasp, much less resist, the forces that would displace it.

Trevor‑Roper was more than a historian. He was a court intellectual whose authority derived from proximity to power, social status, and Britain’s reverence for Oxbridge as guardian of national culture. His work advanced a view of British history that legitimised the existing order: rational, moderate, anti‑revolutionary, and deeply wary of mass politics.

The Don as Defender of the Establishment

Trevor‑Roper’s postwar prominence grew directly from the wartime experience that shaped Kidd’s generation of dons. His intelligence work gave him access to the state, a reputation for administrative competence, and the conviction that intellectual authority belonged within government. He emerged not as a radical critic, but as a trusted interpreter of Britain’s past for the ruling class. Whether writing on the Puritans, the Civil War, or historical method, he reinforced a conservative narrative in which national stability depended on elite stewardship and resistance to ideological extremes. In this sense, Trevor‑Roper acted as an ideological stabiliser, helping sustain bourgeois hegemony during the fragile postwar settlement.

Kidd emphasises Trevor‑Roper’s legendary feuds — with A.J.P. Taylor, with Lawrence Stone, with anyone who threatened his intellectual territory. These were not merely personal eccentricities. They were the internal politics of a caste whose authority depended on maintaining hierarchical control over the production of historical knowledge.

Trevor‑Roper’s battles were, in effect, defensive actions against the encroachment of new methods, new disciplines, and new social forces. His hostility to social history, his contempt for sociology, and his suspicion of Marxist analysis were expressions of a deeper fear: that the bourgeois narrative of British history was losing its grip.His feuds were the last gasps of a declining intellectual aristocracy.

The Hitler Diaries Debacle: A Crisis of Bourgeois Authority

The 1983 Hitler Diaries scandal, in which Trevor‑Roper authenticated forged documents, is often seen as a personal humiliation. Yet it also exposed a wider crisis. His error was more than a lapse in expertise: it revealed the fading authority once automatically granted to Oxbridge dons, the susceptibility of elite intellectuals to media spectacle and commercial pressure, and the old establishment’s inability to adapt to a market‑driven cultural environment. The scandal became symbolic: the bourgeois historian, once treated as an arbiter of national truth, was shown to be fallible, compromised, and out of step with Thatcherism’s emerging order.

Thatcherism and the End of Trevor‑Roper’s World

Trevor‑Roper’s career spanned the “twilight” of the dons that Kidd describes. He lived to see the world that had sustained him dismantled by Thatcher’s reforms, as market logic displaced elite cultural authority, managerial bureaucracy replaced the Oxbridge intellectual, and the social foundations that had allowed dons to act as an unelected arm of the state were destroyed. His marginalisation in the 1980s was therefore not merely personal misfortune, but the political liquidation of the caste he represented.

From a Marxist perspective, Trevor‑Roper’s importance lies less in his scholarship, however stylish, than in his social function. He defended bourgeois historical interpretation, managed elite ideology, and ultimately became a casualty of the ruling class’s shift from paternalistic conservatism to neoliberal aggression. His career traces the arc of the British bourgeois intelligentsia: wartime integration into the state, authority sustained by cultural deference and institutional prestige, crisis under the pressures of mass politics and intellectual diversification, and collapse under Thatcherism’s assault on elite autonomy. Trevor‑Roper was therefore more than a don: he embodied a social order no longer able to reproduce its own ideological guardians.

Conclusion

The rise of artificial intelligence, the commodification of research, and the corporate transformation of universities mark a new phase in the crisis of bourgeois intellectual production. Kidd’s dons belonged to the last generation whose authority was socially assumed rather than bureaucratically measured. Their disappearance was not an isolated event, but part of the bourgeoisie’s wider failure to sustain a coherent ideological worldview.

Twilight of the Dons is not simply a history of Oxbridge. It is a chronicle of the collapse of a ruling‑class intellectual apparatus. Kidd’s affection for his subjects cannot obscure the truth: the dons were the final representatives of a decaying social order, undone not by revolution but by the internal contradictions of capitalism itself.

Podcast Episode: The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and the Erasure of Fascism’s Class Roots

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Pip: Fascism as moral aberration, justice as emotional spectacle, and eight women whose humanity supposedly unlocked Nuremberg's true meaning — freerein61 has thoughts, and they are not gentle.

Mara: This episode follows a single extended argument: a review of Natalie Livingstone's The Nuremberg Women, and what it exposes about how liberal historiography handles fascism, class, and the politics of the postwar trials.

Pip: Let's start with the book, the review that praised it, and why both together tell a story that the post argues is more comfortable than it is honest.

The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and Fascism's Class Roots

Mara: The post opens with Natalie Livingstone's own framing of her book — eight women at Nuremberg, a "fresh" and "humanising" account that, she claims, made the proceedings "more democratic" and contributed to the perception that "justice was served." That self-description is where the critique begins.

Pip: And the critique lands hard. The post's core charge is that centering personal stories at Nuremberg is not just incomplete — it is ideologically functional. The comfort is the point.

Mara: Katja Hoyer's review in the TLS is the immediate target. The post describes it as "a refined form of liberal historiography — graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive," one that replaces structural analysis with narrative empathy and turns "structural violence into emotional spectacle."

Pip: Graceful and evasive is a devastating combination. You feel like you've understood something and you've been carefully steered away from it.

Mara: The post is precise about what Hoyer omits: the trials as geopolitical performance, the selective prosecution that left German capitalism's economic foundations intact, the reintegration of former Nazis into the Cold War state. None of that appears in Hoyer's account.

Pip: Instead, Nazi defendants become psychological monsters, the women become moral witnesses, and Nuremberg becomes a cathartic encounter with evil. Tidy. Reassuring. Structurally useless.

Mara: The post extends that charge directly to Livingstone. Her focus on figures like Erika Mann observing Göring and Streicher as "gaunt," "broken," or "like wild beasts in a zoo" is described as "trivia presented as historical insight." The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945, the post argues, tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power.

Pip: The industrialists — Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farben — largely avoided serious punishment. That absence is the argument's spine.

Mara: On Laura Knight, the British war artist, the post makes a sharp point: her paintings are presented by Livingstone as capturing the proceedings' humanity, but "art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial's image as civilised, rational, and humane." Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.

Mara: The post also takes on Livingstone's treatment of Ursula von Kardoff as a symbol of the new Germany — and rejects it. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved and realigned westward. Casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats, the post argues, aids rehabilitation rather than reckoning.

Pip: And on gender, the post is equally direct. Livingstone treats women as moral anchors by nature. The post calls that liberal-essentialist — gender as a social relation, not a moral category, and the gendered labour at Nuremberg served the trial's ideological presentation without overcoming its political limits.

Mara: The closing judgment is unsparing: "Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served."

Pip: The women of Nuremberg as workers, agents, and participants in a politically constrained legal proceeding — that's the recovery the post is after, and it's a genuinely different frame than the one either Livingstone or Hoyer offers.

Mara: The throughline is consistent: liberal historiography describes the emotional aftermath of structural violence but cannot explain its foundations.

Pip: Which means the next question is always the one it won't ask — what produced this, and who was protected when it ended.

The Nuremberg Women: Liberal Mythmaking and the Erasure of Fascism’s Class Roots

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A review of Natalie Livingstone’s new book

Natalie Livingstone describes The Nuremberg Women as a “fresh” and “humanising” depiction of the Nuremberg Trials, highlighting eight women—including journalists, interpreters, witnesses, artists, and administrators—whose efforts, she claims, made the proceedings “more democratic” and contributed to the perception that “justice was served.” Nonetheless, the book aligns with contemporary liberal historiography, emphasising personal stories, moral judgments, and depoliticisation. It masks the underlying class conflicts of fascism and neglects the political limitations inherent in the trials.

Livingstone’s book aligns with a recent microhistorical genre that emphasises personal experience rather than broad historical causality, prioritising emotional immediacy over political clarity. This creates a narrative filled with anecdotes but potentially misleading regarding its historical and political significance.

The book has been thoroughly reviewed. Notably, Katja Hoyer’s critique in the TLS stands out from a political viewpoint. Her review of The Nuremberg Women exemplifies a refined form of liberal historiography—graceful and compassionate, yet ultimately evasive. It demonstrates a style that appeals to the reader’s moral instincts while subtly lacking the political and structural context of the event. By lauding Natalie Livingstone’s microhistory, Hoyer reflects a broader ideological pattern: replacing detailed analysis with narrative empathy and transforming structural violence into emotional spectacle. As a result, the review appears to enhance our understanding of Nuremberg but in fact limits it by depicting the women in the trials as moral witnesses rather than active participants in the postwar justice system.

Hoyer aims to humanise the Nuremberg Trials by highlighting women who typed transcripts, translated interrogations, and experienced the surreal environment of occupied Germany. While recognising the importance of reclaiming women’s labour, she does not view these women as part of a gendered labour system. Instead, she portrays them as emotional mediators—conscience bearers, moral stabilisers, and psychological interpreters. This approach is more sentimental than historical, disguising insight with emotion. The women were not merely moral spectators; they were integral to the bureaucratic machinery that facilitated the Allies’ legal theatre. Their work was organised, exploited, and instrumentalised, and reducing them to psychological witnesses ignores the conditions that made their roles necessary.

Nuremberg Without Politics

Hoyer’s review is most revealing in its omissions. The Nuremberg Trials were not simply a moral reckoning with fascism; they were also a geopolitical performance that legitimised the postwar order, a selective prosecution that spared the economic foundations of German imperialism, a mechanism for reintegrating former Nazis into the emerging Cold War state, and a legal spectacle that concealed the class forces behind fascism. Hoyer acknowledges none of this. Instead, she presents the trials as a psychological drama in ruined Germany, witnessed by women whose moral clarity offsets the defendants’ brutality.

This is the liberal fantasy: fascism appears as a moral aberration rather than a structural product of capitalist crisis. Hoyer’s praise for Livingstone’s narrative craft is revealing. She commends the book’s vivid scenes, reconstructed conversations, and psychological atmosphere, but narrative is never neutral. It organises meaning ideologically, privileging the exceptional over the typical, the visible over the structural, and the personal over the political. In Hoyer’s hands, microhistory becomes a way to avoid the larger question: what social forces produced fascism, and what political economy shaped its juridical aftermath? By centering individual women, Hoyer displaces the trials’ structural contradictions, replacing analysis with empathy and empathy with moral reassurance.

The Depoliticisation of Fascism

What is most troubling in Hoyer’s review is its understated depoliticisation of fascism. She presents the Nazi defendants as psychological monsters, the women as moral witnesses, and the trials as a cathartic encounter with evil. The framing is comforting, but historically misleading. Fascism was not a mental pathology; it was a class project, a violent defense of property relations amid capitalist crisis. The Nuremberg Trials did not dismantle that order; they purified its image, punishing the most visible criminals while leaving intact the structures that made their crimes possible. Hoyer cannot confront this because her method forecloses it: liberal humanism can describe the emotional aftermath of structural violence, but not explain its foundations.

Empathy cannot replace analysis. It is not enough to sympathise with the women of Nuremberg; we must examine the conditions that shaped their labour, the political forces that defined their roles, and the ideological purposes their presence served. Hoyer’s review offers emotional satisfaction while withholding historical understanding. It is an elegant evasion.

Katja Hoyer’s review exposes a broader weakness in contemporary historiography: the dominance of liberal sentiment over structural analysis. It presents history as moral reassurance rather than explanation, humanising power instead of scrutinising it. The women of Nuremberg deserve more than the role of emotional witnesses in a liberal morality play. They should be understood as workers, agents, and participants in one of the twentieth century’s most politically charged legal proceedings. To recover that reality, we must move beyond Hoyer’s humanist framing and confront the structural conditions her review leaves untouched.

The Personalisation of History

Livingstone presents the trials through the lives of eight women, including Erika Mann, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Tatiana Stupnikova, Laura Knight, Ursula von Kardoff, Ingeborg Kálnoky, and two others whose roles are framed as morally or emotionally decisive. Their stories are rendered with sympathy and detail. Yet the book’s central claim—that these women’s “human” and “intimate” experiences disclose Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—rests on a false and politically reactionary premise.

Contrary to Livingstone’s account, the Nuremberg Trials were not a moral drama in which personal courage and emotional labour delivered justice. They were a legal response to a crisis of world capitalism, shaped by Allied geopolitical interests and the emerging Cold War. Politically selective and tightly constrained, they could not confront fascism’s social roots. By centering individual experience, Livingstone sidesteps the essential question: what social forces produced fascism, and why did Nuremberg fail to hold them accountable?

The Erasure of Capitalism’s Responsibility for Fascism

Livingstone’s narrative accepts the juridical fiction that fascism was the work of a handful of political criminals. Her focus on the Nazi defendants’ physical and psychological decline, as Erika Mann observed at Camp Ashcan, reinforces this myth. Descriptions of Göring, Streicher, and others as “gaunt,” “broken,” or “like wild beasts in a zoo” are treated as evidence of moral collapse, but this is trivia presented as historical insight. The condition of Nazi leaders in 1945 tells us nothing about the class forces that brought them to power. Fascism arose not from individual pathology, but from the crisis of German capitalism, the destruction of the workers’ movement, and the support of monopoly capital. The industrialists who financed and sustained Hitler—Krupp, Thyssen, and IG Farben—largely avoided serious punishment. Livingstone does not confront this because her framework obscures it. Nuremberg’s failure to indict capitalism was not incidental; it was the trials’ central political limitation, a reality her human-interest narrative conceals.

The Liberal Myth of “Democratic Justice”

Livingstone repeatedly argues that women’s participation made the trials “more democratic” and “more humane.” The claim is sentimental but politically hollow. Women interpreters, journalists, and artists did not alter the trials’ fundamental character, which was determined by the geopolitical aims of the United States and Britain as they moved toward confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Tatiana Stupnikova, the Russian interpreter, exemplifies this problem. Livingstone presents her labour as evidence of international cooperation and moral seriousness. Yet the emerging Cold War shaped every aspect of the trial, as the Allies disputed charges, evidence, and the scope of prosecution. Nuremberg was not a harmonious exercise in global justice, but a site of political conflict. By turning these tensions into background for personal drama, Livingstone reinforces the liberal myth of Nuremberg as a triumph of Western democratic values.

Laura Knight, the British war artist, allows Livingstone to aestheticise the trial. Knight’s paintings are presented as capturing the proceedings’ “humanity,” but this framing has an ideological function: it turns a legally constrained, politically shaped process into a cultural scene of moral reckoning. Art at Nuremberg did not uncover deeper truths; it helped construct the trial’s image as civilised, rational, and humane. Livingstone accepts that image without criticism.

Livingstone presents Ursula von Kardoff, the German journalist, as a symbol of the “new Germany”: a nation prepared to confront its past and embrace democracy. This distorts history. The German bourgeoisie was not remade after 1945; it was preserved. The class forces that supported Hitler were absorbed into the postwar order and realigned with the Western powers against the Soviet Union. Livingstone’s portrayal of Kardoff therefore aids the rehabilitation of the German ruling class by casting its postwar representatives as enlightened democrats.

Gender as Moral Category

Livingstone treats gender in liberal-essentialist terms, casting women as moral anchors, emotional mediators, and guardians of humanity. Their labour—as interpreters, witnesses, reporters, and carers—is presented as inherently humane and democratising. A Marxist analysis, by contrast, understands gender as a social relation rather than a moral category. The gendered labour at Nuremberg shaped the trial’s ideological presentation but did not overcome its political limits. Livingstone’s sentimental feminism humanises the proceedings while obscuring their structural constraints.The Nuremberg Women is polished and readable, but politically reactionary. By personalising history, moralising justice, aestheticising suffering, and erasing fascism’s class roots, Livingstone ultimately reinforces the dominant liberal narrative of the postwar order.

The book’s central claim—that the emotional labour and personal courage of eight women reveal Nuremberg’s “true” meaning—is untenable. Nuremberg can be understood only through a materialist analysis of the social forces that produced fascism and the political limits that shaped the trials.

A Historiographical Critique of Bye Bye Blackshirt: Popular Frontism, Political Function, and the Construction of Anti Fascist Memory

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This essay offers a historiographical analysis that ‘Bye Bye Blackshirt’, published by Bookmarks (the Socialist Workers Party’s imprint), is more than just a straightforward recounting of 1930s anti-fascism. It is a politically driven text that reflects the SWP’s current strategic priorities through its interpretive approach. Bye Bye Blackshirt is not an unbiased historical account; it functions as a tool for contemporary politics. The analysis situates the book within a broader tradition of Popular Frontist historiography and argues that its omissions are deliberate, intentionally serving the political objectives it seeks to promote.

Krantz’s Position Within the Historiography

Mark Krantz holds a unique position in British anti-fascist historiography. He is not an academic historian and does not follow the typical methodological approaches used in scholarly research on the CPGB, the Comintern, or interwar political culture. Instead, his work falls into the category of movement history: concise, accessible stories created within political groups to educate and mobilize members.

Krantz’s account of 1930s anti-fascism emphasises heroic street-level efforts, particularly highlighting Cable Street as a pivotal moment when working-class communities united to stop Mosley’s Blackshirts. This perspective reflects the SWP’s tradition of celebrating direct action and mass mobilisation. Yet this narrative overlooks a significant historiographical concern: the broader political circumstances that underpinned the mobilisation. ‘There is no question that the physical resistance to fascist provocation was correct and necessary. But the political framework within which it was organised was catastrophic.”

Krantz’s work does not examine the CPGB’s switch to the Popular Front line in 1935 or the strategic effects of linking working-class militancy with alliances with “progressive” bourgeois groups and the Labour Party. This results in a depoliticised heroism—action lacking strategy and militancy lacking context. The main historiographical oversight in Krantz’s work is the neglect of Popular Frontism as an analytical lens. Some Marxist academic historians have demonstrated that the CPGB’s anti-fascist efforts after 1935 were closely tied to its Popular Front stance; the Comintern’s Seventh Congress reoriented communist strategy across Europe; and anti-fascist mobilisation aimed to defend “democracy”—that is, the capitalist state—rather than promote socialist revolution.

Krantz’s narrative obscures the broader strategic context. The CPGB is presented as a militant, principled entity rather than a party following the Comintern line, which ultimately dampened its revolutionary potential. “The CPGB abandoned the fight for workers’ power in favor of defending ‘democracy against fascism’ — meaning the defence of British capitalism…” Krantz’s omission isn’t accidental; it is a deliberate choice essential for the political purpose of his book.

Krantz’s portrayal of Cable Street reflects a longstanding tradition of mythologised anti-fascist remembrance. Researchers like Stephen Ward have demonstrated that Cable Street has frequently been reinterpreted as a pivotal victory, even though Mosley’s movement was already waning, the state, rather than the crowd, ultimately halted the march, and the CPGB’s strategy was moving toward a patriotic defence of the nation.

Krantz presents a celebratory version of Cable Street, turning it into a myth that supports modern activism. Raphael Samuel called such constructs “theatres of memory”: political movements shaping emotionally compelling histories to meet current needs. The issue isn’t that Krantz praises Cable Street; it’s that he omits its political repercussions, such as the CPGB’s support for Churchill during WWII, opposition to strikes at the time, and turning anti-fascist militancy into backing for the 1945 Labour government and the British Empire. None of these aspects are reflected in Krantz’s version.

 The SWP’s Strategic Reproduction of Popular Frontism

Krantz’s historiography is not merely flawed; it serves a political purpose. The  SWP tells workers to oppose the fascists while remaining politically tethered to the parties that cultivate them.” Krantz’s book offers a historical rationale for this approach. By depicting 1930s anti-fascism as an example of wide, cross-class unity, he justifies SUTR’s alliances with Labour MPs, trade-union officials, and liberal NGOs. This reasoning mirrors that which influenced the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s and Unite Against Fascism in the 2000s. Chris Marsden’s analysis reveals that these coalitions often linked workers to Labour governments pursuing austerity, setting the stage for far-right growth.

Krantz’s history serves a political purpose by legitimizing Popular Frontism and overlooking its strategic failures. From a historiographical perspective, Krantz’s work has notable methodological shortcomings: it lacks archival research, as it does not consult CPGB records, Comintern correspondence, or Home Office files. Additionally, it does not engage with secondary sources like Morgan, Thorpe, Linehan, Copsey, Renton, or Fishman. The narrative is teleological, emphasizing an inevitable move toward anti-fascist victory while ignoring the flawed aspects of the Popular Front strategy. Moreover, it is presentist, interpreting the past solely in light of current activist concerns. These limitations are not accidental but reflect intrinsic features of movement history as a genre.

The SWPs’ and Krantz’s historiography serves two main roles: first, it legitimises cross-class anti-fascist alliances by offering historical precedents; second, it obfuscates the role of the Popular Front, thereby politically disarming the working class. This dual purpose presents a methodological challenge because the book’s interpretive perspective is not impartial but rooted in a current political strategy.

The 1934–36 Conjuncture and the CPGB’s Popular Front Turn

The period from 1934 to 1936, covered by Bye Bye Blackshirt, marks a pivotal moment in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s political shift. After the 1935 Seventh Congress of the Comintern, the CPGB embraced the Popular Front strategy, described as “the subordination of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism to cross-class alliances with ‘progressive’ bourgeois forces.”

For academic historians, the key issue is the interpretive tension: The CPGB’s anti-fascist efforts were genuine and often courageous, but their strategy aimed at defending “democracy”—which they equated with the British capitalist state—rather than pushing for socialist revolution. This tension is usually overlooked in SWP historiography, which tends to portray anti-fascist mobilisation as straightforwardly political and without contradictions, ignoring its complex strategic context.

Patriotism, War, and the CPGB’s Political Trajectory

The CPGB’s anti-fascism was described as being ‘politically indistinguishable from British patriotism,’ culminating in its support for Churchill and opposition to strikes during WWII. This statement isn’t merely polemical; it reflects a historiographical view that regards Popular Frontism as primarily focused on national defence rather than class struggle.

The peak of anti-fascist activities in the 1930s was not socialism, but the 1945 Labour government, which supported the British Empire and suppressed colonial revolutions. This indicates that Popular Frontism tends to direct working-class militancy towards supporting the capitalist state.

The SWP’s Historical Falsification and the Reproduction of Popular Front Strategy

The clearest historiographical critique focuses on the SWP’s current politics. It suggests that the SWP’s admiration for 1930s anti-fascism is justified because the party maintains the same strategic stance today. “The SWP advises workers to oppose fascists while still aligning politically with parties that support them.” The analysis references Chris Marsden’s critique of SUTR, mentioning that SUTR regards Labour and the TUC as “progressive.” Historically, the Anti-Nazi League connected workers with Labour during IMF austerity, which helped create the political conditions that led to Thatcher’s electoral success.

For academic historians, the key point is methodological: the SWP’s historical narrative is shaped by its present‑day alliances, and this shaping produces systematic distortions.

Toward a Revolutionary Historiography of Anti‑Fascism

A truly Marxist history of the fight against Mosley would involve recognising the bravery of Jewish workers and socialist youth; situating that heroism within a political context that ultimately disarmed the working class; and highlighting Trotsky’s key insight that fascism arises from capitalism and cannot be defeated through cross-class alliances. The SWP cannot produce such a history because it would accuse its own political practice. The title — Bye Bye Blackshirt — reflects a celebratory street-level story that avoids addressing the structural roots of fascism.

Defeating fascism today involves distancing oneself from the Labour Party, trade unions, and other institutions that, according to the SWP’s book, are preserved by current efforts. For academic historians, it is important to show es how political groups create selective histories — and how these shape, distort, or obscure true understanding. It encourages a reevaluation of anti-fascist history that emphasises the political contexts shaping the creation of narratives.

Secondary Literature and Bibliography

1. Core Historiography on British Communism and Anti‑Fascism

  • Callaghan, John. Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993. A foundational study of CPGB ideology, essential for contextualising the Popular Front turn.
  • Morgan, Kevin. Bolshevism and the British Left: A Study in British Communism. Manchester University Press, 2006. Offers a detailed account of CPGB political culture and strategic shifts.
  • Thorpe, Andrew. The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–43. Manchester University Press, 2000. Crucial for understanding Comintern influence on CPGB strategy, including the 1935 Popular Front line.
  • Renton, David. Fascism, Anti‑Fascism and Britain in the 1940s. London: Routledge, 2000. A key text on British anti‑fascism, though Renton’s framing is often sympathetic to Popular Frontist interpretations.
  • Linehan, Thomas. East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South‑West Essex, 1933–40. London: Frank Cass, 1996. Essential for understanding the social geography of fascist mobilisation.
  • Fishman, Nina. The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1935–1945. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995. Important for the CPGB’s role in the labour movement during the Popular Front and wartime periods.

2. Cable Street and Anti‑Fascist Mobilisation

  • Glynn, Sean, and John Oxley. Cable Street: The Story of a Militant Anti‑Fascist Movement. London: National Council for Civil Liberties, 1976. A classic narrative account, often cited in celebratory histories.
  • Ward, Stephen. “The Battle of Cable Street: Myths and Realities.” History Today 36, no. 10 (1986): 10–16. A critical reassessment of the event’s mythology.
  • Copsey, Nigel. Anti‑Fascism in Britain. London: Routledge, 2000. A comprehensive survey of anti‑fascist traditions, including the CPGB’s role.

3. Popular Frontism: International Context

  • Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Chicago: Haymarket, 2006. While chronologically earlier, Broué’s analysis of Comintern strategy is essential background.
  • Jackson, Gabriel. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939. Princeton University Press, 1965. A standard scholarly account of the Popular Front’s contradictions in Spain.
  • Kedward, H.R. La Résistance en France. Oxford University Press, 1978. Useful for understanding the French Popular Front’s demobilisation of the 1936 strike wave.
  • Judt, Tony. Marxism and the French Left. Oxford University Press, 1986. A major work on Popular Front ideology and its political consequences.

4. Trotsky’s Theoretical Critique of the Popular Front

(These are primary sources but essential for the theoretical framing.)

  • Trotsky, Leon. Whither France? 1934–35. The key text for understanding the critique referenced in your document.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971. Contains Trotsky’s analysis of the Comintern’s oscillation between “social fascism” and Popular Frontism.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973. Essential for the argument that Popular Frontism facilitated Franco’s victory.

5. Historiography of Labour, the TUC, and State Power

  • Pelling, Henry. The British Labour Movement, 1770–1920. London: Macmillan, 1963. A classic overview of Labour’s structural relationship to the state.
  • Saville, John. The Consolidation of the Capitalist State, 1920–1930. London: Pluto Press, 1994. A Marxist analysis of Labour’s role in stabilising British capitalism.
  • Cronin, James E. Labour and Society in Britain, 1918–1979. London: Batsford, 1984. Useful for contextualising Labour’s post‑war imperial role.

6. Historiography on the SWP, Anti‑Nazi League, and Contemporary Anti‑Fascism

  • Birchall, Ian. The Anti‑Nazi League: A Critical History. London: Socialist Workers Party, 2010. A sympathetic internal history; useful for understanding the SWP’s own narrative.
  • Renton, David. Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti‑Nazi League 1976–1982. London: Routledge, 2018. A more scholarly treatment of the ANL’s political function.
  • Marsden, Chris. Various analyses on WSWS (World Socialist Web Site). These are essential for the critique, especially regarding SUTR and the SWP’s Popular Frontist strategy.

7. Theoretical and Methodological Works on Anti‑Fascist Memory

  • Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994. A foundational text on how political movements construct usable pasts.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Politics for a Rational Left. London: Verso, 1989. Includes reflections on Popular Frontism and historical memory.
  • Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso, 1976. Useful for situating Trotskyist historiography within broader Marxist debates.

The Anglosphere’s Mental Health Crisis and the Social Catastrophe of Capitalism

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Recently, a new wave of commentary has surfaced trying to account for the rapidly worsening mental health crisis among young people in advanced capitalist nations. One notable analysis is by Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch, who uses various data sources to show that the crisis is primarily concentrated in the Anglosphere—comprising the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. His charts and graphs are presented as a calm, fact-based contribution to a debate often viewed as inflated by exaggeration and moral panic.

However, like many mainstream analyses, Burn-Murdoch’s discussion ends right where the deeper explanation starts. He highlights symptoms but avoids diagnosing the underlying problem. His perspective is limited by the ideological beliefs of the capitalist system, preventing him from confronting the social reality that millions of young people are being mentally overwhelmed by a system that makes a decent and secure life impossible.

The Limits of Bourgeois Explanation

Burn-Murdoch’s main argument — that the crisis originates from “shattered homeownership expectations” — exemplifies bourgeois reductionism. This narrative suggests that young people were brought up to expect to own property, and the housing market’s failure to meet these expectations has led to widespread despair.

This argument diminishes a serious social crisis by framing the suffering of a whole generation as simply unmet consumer expectations. It suggests that lowering mortgage rates or fixing the housing ladder would eliminate the crisis. This perspective is not only insufficient but also ideological, as it assumes capitalism is inherently stable and that the issue stems solely from unequal distribution of rewards.

The truth is quite different. The housing crisis is not a separate failure but a sign of the ongoing impoverishment of the working class. As an analysis from WSWS pointed out years ago, the dream of owning a home in America has become out of reach for many young families due to declining wages, increasing expenses, and exploitative lending practices — not because capitalism has failed, but because it is operating precisely as intended.

Mental Illness as a Social Disease

Mainstream commentators’ refusal to acknowledge social causes is deliberate, not accidental—it’s ideological. Over 25 years ago, the WSWS noted that the US Surgeon General’s report on mental illness acknowledged that “the precise causes of most mental disorders are not known,” yet it emphasised brain chemistry and genetics as the main causes. The WSWS pointed out that this choice was obvious: “Can anyone imagine the Surgeon-General of the United States issuing a major report declaring that the epidemic of mental illness in America is due to … American society?”

Acknowledging mental illness as a social disease implicates the capitalist system itself, raising controversial political issues about societal organisation, the dismantling of social protections, and the isolation of human life driven by profit motives. Burn-Murdoch, like others supporting the current system, is unable to go beyond describing the crisis; he cannot explain its underlying causes.

The Historical Evolution of Psychiatric Ideology Under Capitalism

The current mental-health crisis, affecting millions in advanced capitalist nations, is not just an outbreak of individual issues. Instead, it results from a long history where psychiatry has been influenced and manipulated by capitalism’s demands. Psychiatry is not a purely scientific field; it has developed alongside capitalism’s social relations, mirroring its contradictions, fears, and its primary goal to maintain the status quo. To fully understand today’s crisis, one must trace this development from the Industrial Revolution to its present-day neoliberal state.

Psychiatry’s Birth in the Age of Industrial Discipline

Modern psychiatry developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, coinciding with the consolidation of capitalism’s dominance over society. The growth of factories, wage labour, and urbanisation led to new forms of social dislocation and human suffering. However, the ruling class did not see these issues as signs of the harshness of early industrial capitalism. Instead, they were viewed as individual disorders.

The asylum, a core institution of early psychiatry, had two main roles. It separated those deemed “unproductive,” “irrational,” or “dangerous” and upheld norms of bourgeois discipline. The so-called ‘moral treatment’ introduced by Philippe Pinel and William Tuke was not truly moral in an emancipatory sense; rather, it was a system of surveillance, obedience, and labour aimed at shaping individuals into compliant members of the growing capitalist society. The ideological premise was clear: if individuals could not function within capitalist society, the fault lay within the individual, not the society.

Pathologising Deviance, Protecting Property

As capitalism developed in the 19th century, psychiatry broadened its scope. During the Victorian era, issues like poverty, alcoholism, “hysteria,” and political dissent became medical concerns. Women challenging patriarchal norms were diagnosed with “nervous disorders,” while workers protesting poor conditions were deemed unstable or criminally inclined.

The bourgeois family, regarded as the ideal core of capitalist society, was seen as the normal and healthy family unit, with any deviations viewed as abnormal. Psychiatry emerged as a tool for enforcing social conformity and upholding property relations. During this era, biological determinism and early eugenics gained prominence, offering pseudo-scientific backing for class structures and imperial rule. Mental illness was often depicted as hereditary, serving as a convenient justification for maintaining social inequality.

The Age of Social Crisis and Biological Reductionism

The early 20th century was marked by world war, economic depression, and revolutionary change. Millions of soldiers returning from the First World War exhibited “shell shock,” a condition that challenged the idea that mental suffering is solely individual. However, instead of addressing social causes of trauma, the ruling class reinforced biological reductionism. During the interwar years, treatments like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy emerged, reflecting a system eager to hide the social roots of widespread psychological crises, rather than genuinely improve patient care.

The Great Depression produced widespread despair, unemployment, and social disintegration. But psychiatry did not interpret these phenomena as consequences of capitalism’s crisis. Instead, it doubled down on individual pathology, reinforcing the ideological firewall between social conditions and mental suffering.

The Welfare State and the Pharmaceutical Revolution

After 1945, a period of temporary stability emerged. The welfare state, increased wages, and expanded social services helped reduce many of capitalism’s worst abuses. Psychiatry evolved accordingly, gradually phasing out asylums and introducing new psychotropic medications like chlorpromazine, antidepressants, and benzodiazepines, which offered chemical remedies for psychological issues. However, the ideological basis remained unchanged: mental illness was still seen as an individual malfunction. Systematic neglect of the social origins of suffering—such as alienation, exploitation, racial oppression, and gender inequality—continued to be a defining feature of psychiatric theory.

The pharmaceutical industry, embedded within the capitalist profit system, grew into a powerful force. Treatment was turned into a commodity, transforming the patient into a consumer. The role of the psychiatrist shifted to simply prescribing. These social conflicts were hidden behind the promise of quick chemical relief.

The Atomization of Society and the Explosion of Diagnosis

The late 20th century marked the rise of neoliberalism, characterised by deregulation, privatisation, union-busting, and the erosion of social protections. This led to increased societal atomization, causing unprecedented stress, insecurity, and despair. Psychiatric ideology adapted to this new environment, with the DSM expanding significantly to include more diagnostic categories and medicalising common distress. Conditions like ADHD, mild ASD, generalised anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder emerged as widespread phenomena.

This surge in diagnoses was deliberate, fulfilling three political roles: it personalises social suffering, thus avoiding scrutiny of capitalism’s influence; it opens new markets for pharmaceutical companies; and it disciplines workers by framing distress as an individual flaw instead of a consequence of exploitation. During the neoliberal era, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) also gained prominence. Designed to help individuals adapt to difficult conditions rather than change them, its main message—”change your thoughts, not your circumstances”—aligns closely with capitalist values.

Capitalism’s Social Breakdown and the Ideological Dead End

Today’s mental health crisis stems from forty years of social counter-revolution. Young people are burdened with unstable jobs, skyrocketing housing costs, declining public services, and broken community networks. The rise of the gig economy has undermined job stability. Market forces have dismantled social connections. The obsession with personal “success” and “failure” has become dangerously extreme.

Psychiatric ideology remains stuck in a framework from two centuries ago. It fails to recognise that capitalism itself fuels widespread psychological suffering and that mental illness is a social issue. Instead, it attributes distress to neurotransmitters, genetics, and personal problems, expanding diagnostic categories and prescribing more medication. It promotes “resilience training” and “mindfulness” as solutions for enduring conditions that should be eliminated. The ruling class relies on this ideology; without it, the social consequences of the crisis could be explosive.

Why the Anglosphere?

The crisis is concentrated in the Anglosphere for obvious reasons. These countries have seen the most extensive dismantling of the postwar welfare state, the most aggressive erosion of job security through the gig economy, and the most ruthless subordination of social bonds to market forces. Additionally, the ideology of individual “success” and “failure” is deeply rooted here.

Young workers in these nations face conditions not seen since the Great Depression. They face job insecurity, unaffordable housing, failing public services, and an inability to reach fundamental life milestones such as starting families or securing stable homes. A WSWS analysis of youth suicide pointed out: “The youngest generation of workers is entering adulthood in the wake of 40 years of social counter-revolution against the working class.” This issue isn’t just about unfulfilled dreams of property ownership; it involves the breakdown of the material and social bases necessary for a humane life.

The Medicalisation of Social Misery

Burn-Murdoch warns against the dangers of medicalising everyday distress, but he views this mainly as a technical issue of diagnostic accuracy. In truth, medicalising social suffering serves as a political tactic. It is a cost-effective and ideologically easy method for the ruling class to control an increasingly distressed population. When millions of children have trouble focusing, the cause isn’t blamed on overcrowded classrooms, exhausted parents, or economic insecurity. Instead, they are branded as neurologically disordered and treated with medication. Similarly, young adults overwhelmed by unstable jobs and high living costs are told their suffering results from chemical imbalances.

Decades ago, the WSWS cautioned that governments were increasingly using psychoactive drugs to control children’s behaviour, pointing out that British laws were so extensive that doctors could prescribe medication simply because children struggled with math or spelling. This was not a diagnostic error; it was intentional social policy.

The CDC Data and the Class Question

The CDC’s 2021 Youth Risk Behaviour Survey revealed that 42% of US high school students felt persistent sadness or hopelessness, 22% seriously considered suicide, and 10% attempted it. However, the CDC primarily interpreted these statistics through race and sexual identity, avoiding discussions of class. This omission is revealing: identity categories are politically safe, whereas class is not. Analysing the crisis through class would mean acknowledging that capitalism causes widespread psychological suffering, even for those who are housed, fed, and employed. As the WSWS pointed out, “When we finally reach a point where half the population can’t, at one time or another, function — who, then, is really sick: the individual or society?”

The Political Conclusion

Burn-Murdoch’s technocratic ideas—improving data, diagnostics, and policy targeting—are like rearranging furniture in a house on fire. They don’t address the root cause of the crisis. Under capitalism, mental health treatment is only emergency care: it patches psychic wounds so individuals can keep functioning in a system that caused their sickness. The mental health epidemic won’t be resolved through more therapy, medication, or affordable housing—though these may help reduce suffering. A true solution requires the working class to gain political power and rebuild society on socialist principles, prioritising human needs over private profits. As the WSWS concluded long ago: “Happiness can become a reality only if its human content is restored to it, and that means that the happiness of one is inseparable from the happiness of all.” This is not just idealism; it’s a political necessity.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Marxist Foundations: Alienation, Social Pathology, and Ideology

  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844).
  • Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846).
  • Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I–III (1867–1894).
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
  • Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923).
  • Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933).
  • Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955).
  • Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952); The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
  • István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (1970).
  • David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
  • Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination (1993).

II. Histories of Psychiatry and Social Control

  • Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (1961).
  • Andrew Scull, The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (1993).
  • Andrew Scull, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (2022).
  • Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (2002).
  • Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985).
  • Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (1961).
  • Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (1989).
  • Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (2007).
  • Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008).
  • Irving Kirsch, The Emperor’s New Drugs (2009).
  • Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (2019).

III. The DSM, Medicalisation, and the Pharmaceutical Industry

  • American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM‑I (1952) through DSM‑5‑TR (2022).
  • Christopher Lane, Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness (2007).
  • Allan V. Horwitz & Jerome Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (2007).
  • Peter Conrad, The Medicalisation of Society (2007).
  • David Healy, Pharmageddon (2012).
  • Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010).
  • Carl Elliott, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (2010).

IV. Social Determinants of Mental Health

  • Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009).
  • Michael Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World (2015).
  • Bruce Alexander, The Globalisation of Addiction (2008).
  • Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research (1969).
  • WHO, Social Determinants of Mental Health (2014).
  • CDC, Youth Risk Behaviour Surveillance System (various years, esp. 2021).

V. Gig Economy, Neoliberalism, and Social Breakdown

  • Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011).
  • Arne L. Kalleberg, Precarious Lives: Job Insecurity and Well‑Being in Rich Democracies (2018).
  • Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty (2017–2020).
  • OECD, How’s Life? Measuring Well‑Being (annual).
  • IMF & ILO reports on labour precarity (various years).

VI. WSWS and ICFI Analyses (Primary Marxist Sources)

(These are not reproduced; only titles and dates are listed.)

  • “Mental Illness and the American Dream,” WSWS, two‑part series (1999).
  • “Youth Suicide and the Social Crisis,” WSWS (various analyses, 2015–2024).
  • “The Gig Economy and the Assault on the Working Class,” WSWS (2017).
  • “The Social Crisis in the United States,” WSWS (multiple reports, 2008–2024).
  • “The Breakdown of Public Health under Capitalism,” WSWS (2020–2023).
  • “The Anglosphere Crisis: A Social Catastrophe,” WSWS (2023–2024).
  • ICFI Statements on Social Conditions and Mental Health (1999–2024).

VII. Additional Critical Works on Capitalism and Social Suffering

  • Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009).
  • Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013).
  • Byung‑Chul Han, The Burnout Society (2010).
  • Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (1998).
  • Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (2000).
  • Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work (2009); Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015).
  • Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — for the historical roots of social discipline.
  • Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (1983) — for racialised dimensions of social control.

VIII. Archival and Government Sources

  • UK Parliamentary Papers on Lunacy Acts (1845–1890).
  • US Surgeon General, Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (1999).
  • WHO Mental Health Atlas (various years).
  • UN Human Development Reports (annual).
  • Office for National Statistics (ONS), UK — mental health, labour precarity, youth well‑being datasets.
  • US Bureau of Labour Statistics — gig economy and contingent work surveys.

IX. Suggested Further Reading for a Marxist History of Psychiatry

  • R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (1960).
  • Franco Basaglia, Psychiatry Inside Out (1980).
  • Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (2011).
  • Mark Rapley, The Social Construction of Mental Illness (2004).
  • Richard Bentall, Doctoring the Mind (2009).
  • Nikolas Rose & Joelle Abi‑Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (2013).

An Opportunity Squandered: Why Your Party Failed

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History seldom provides the left with clear moments. Usually, it appears as a haze filled with contradictions, crises, and uncertain possibilities. However, occasionally, these contradictions become clearer, the fog clears, and a political opportunity emerges—short-lived, obvious, and highly promising. The launch of Your Party was one such occasion.

It appeared after the Corbyn movement was dismantled, during a period when millions of workers, young people, and politically aware individuals were looking for a way to oppose the worsening brutality of British capitalism. The Starmer leadership had turned Labour into a party aligned with the state, security forces, and corporate interests. As a result, the working class found itself without a political home.

Your Party emerged into this vacuum, earning an enthusiastic response: within days, hundreds of thousands expressed interest. This strong reaction was not media exaggeration but a real sign of political radicalisation, indicating that the working class was ready to move away from Labourism and explore new avenues. However, Your Party’s leadership was unprepared for the moment; in fact, they feared it. They were afraid of the working class, of mass participation, and of the consequences of their rhetoric. As a result, they missed the opportunity.

The Labourist Reflex: Bureaucracy as Instinct

Your Party’s tragedy lies in being undermined not by outside foes, but by internally reproduced Labourist habits. The leadership group—self-selected, unaccountable, and cautious—acted from the beginning more like minor officials of a parliamentary system than rebels striving to create a new movement. Their natural inclinations were bureaucratic rather than revolutionary.

They built a party structure aimed at shielding the leadership from the members rather than empowering them. Decisions were taken in private WhatsApp groups, and policies were developed through secret discussions with advisers and consultants. The membership was viewed not as the party’s ultimate authority but as a possible challenge to the leadership’s dominance.

This bureaucratic instinct resulted in several harmful actions: decision-making that was opaque and secretive, factional tactics such as leaking information to adversarial media, pre-emptive expulsions of socialists before democratic structures were in place, legal threats targeting internal critics as a distorted form of “new politics,” and a refusal to develop democratic processes, which left members feeling powerless and confused.

These actions were deliberate, revealing a leadership with a limited political outlook centred on Westminster. They feared popular involvement because they feared the working class. Your Party was effectively doomed at birth because its leaders feared the very force that could have invigorated it.

The Sabotage of the Rank and File

The strongest criticism of Your Party’s leadership is that they never focused on building a party. Instead, they aimed to create a brand. Local branches emerged spontaneously across the country. Volunteers arranged meetings, designed leaflets, and tried to establish local structures on their own—without guidance, resources, or support from the leadership. Rather than assistance, they faced silence, obstruction, and disdain.

The leadership declined to supply funds, materials, organisational guidance, political education, or democratic mechanisms. Branches disintegrated, activists lost interest, and initial enthusiasm vanished. What once could have mobilised tens of thousands turned into a hollow entity, unable to contest elections or influence political discourse. This was not mere incompetence but deliberate political sabotage.

The leadership was concerned that a strong grassroots organisation could threaten their authority. They worried that an informed membership might seek clarity, accountability, and a departure from Labourism. They feared the party could evolve into something beyond their control. Consequently, they deprived it of resources.

The Ideological Vacuum: A Party Without a Programme

Your Party never clearly defined its main purpose: What is the party meant to achieve? Two opposing visions coexist uneasily. One, the Grassroots Socialist Current—anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, rooted in working-class struggles—sought to build a large movement capable of challenging the state and breaking definitively from Labourism. It saw capitalism’s crises as requiring a revolutionary response. The other, the Parliamentary Moralist faction—centred around the Peace and Justice group—favoured a modest, respectable NGO-style organisation, more of a pressure group than a political party, emphasising morality over strategy. They believed politics was mainly about tone, civility, and moral influence, not class struggle. The leadership’s inability to choose between these visions left the organisation paralysed. Instead of defining a clear program, Your Party drifted into empty slogans, identity-politics moralism, and electoral fantasies. A party without a clear program is not truly a party; it is merely a logo.

The Collapse: A Predictable Catastrophe

The results were immediate and catastrophic: polling showed 0% support. Membership remained stagnant at a small fraction of the original sign-ups. The party’s public credibility was shattered. Internal conflicts became its only visible activity. Leaders attributed this to “media hostility” and “growing pains,” but in truth, they engineered the movement’s suppression, fearing its potential for genuine change. The party’s collapse stemmed from leaders’ inability to envision politics beyond limited parliamentary reform.

Your Party’s failure is part of a long, tragic pattern: after 1932, the ILP; post-1956, the CPGB; the Bennite movement; Respect; Left Unity; Momentum; and now Your Party. Every effort to establish a left alternative within the limits of parliamentary reformism collapses due to internal contradictions. The Labour left does not serve as a vessel for socialist politics; it acts as a graveyard for such aspirations. The clear lesson is that the working class cannot be truly emancipated through organisations that fear its power.

The Verdict: A Failure of Nerve, Vision, and Class Politics

Your Party’s failure stemmed from its leadership’s refusal to depart from Labourism. They perpetuated the bureaucratic culture, factionalism, timidity, and disdain for the rank and file that have long characterised the Labour left. The opportunity was genuine, and the moment was historic, but the failure was self-inflicted. Your Party could have been a powerful tool for the working class; instead, it became a symbol of political cowardice. Its decline is not only organisational but also ideological, showing that the Labour left cannot and will not forge a socialist alternative. The challenge remains: to build a party rooted in the working class, unwavering in its principles, ready to confront the capitalist state fearlessly. Your Party was not that; the next must be.

Britain’s Secret Files and the Assassination of Leon Trotsky: What the National Archives at Kew Reveal—and Conceal

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Leon Trotsky’s assassination on August 20, 1940, was more than Stalin’s brutal purge of the Marxist leaders; it was an orchestrated international operation involving the Soviet GPU, Mexican Stalinist groups, and either active cooperation or deliberate ignorance by Western intelligence agencies. Even after 86 years, the British government’s records stored at Kew reveal aspects of this crime that mainstream historians and commentators like David Renton tend to ignore.

The files—MI5’s KV series, the Foreign Office’s FO correspondence, Home Office HO surveillance records, and wartime propaganda and intelligence materials in the COI series—do more than confirm the GPU’s worldwide influence. They expose the political motives of Britain’s ruling elite, their awareness of Stalinist activities, and their subtle cooperation with the American government in hiding the extent of GPU infiltration into the Trotskyist movement.

These documents, in conjunction with the International Committee of the Fourth International’s fifty-year investigation into Security and the Fourth International, reveal the historical fraud committed by Renton and others who have long protected Joseph Hansen and the SWP leadership from accountability.

MI5’s KV Files: Britain’s Intelligence Services Knew the GPU’s Methods

The KV series—MI5’s main intelligence records—hold extensive information on Soviet espionage networks active in Britain, Europe, and the U.S. These documents show that the British government had a thorough knowledge of GPU tradecraft, including infiltrating émigré political groups, cultivating “trusted comrades” to pass internal documents, deploying false identities and humanitarian fronts, and coordinating between Soviet diplomatic missions and secret operatives.

The documents related to the Paris rezidentura and the Red Orchestra verify the GPU’s extensive infiltration into Trotskyist circles, including the activities linked to the killing of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. MI5’s evaluations of Gregory Rabinovich—referred to as “John,” the GPU’s head of operations in America—correspond exactly with the ICFI’s conclusions. Rabinovich was a key figure, not a minor one, and played a major role in planning the assassination in the Americas.

MI5’s KV Files and the Hansen–Rabinovich Meetings: The British State’s Intelligence Record Exposes the Cover‑Up

Joseph Hansen’s secret meetings with Rabinovich—hidden for 37 years—are now even more incriminating. MI5’s files show that Rabinovich would not have risked his cover by meeting a Trotsky secretary unless he were confident he would not be exposed. Renton’s silence on this information is deliberate, not accidental.

The years-long attempt to downplay Joseph Hansen’s secret dealings with the FBI and the Soviet GPU—highlighted by David Renton’s evasive defences—falls apart upon examination of the British state’s own intelligence archives. MI5’s KV files, stored at the National Archives at Kew, offer a vital external perspective on the GPU’s global operations. They reveal a truth that Hansen’s supporters cannot accept: Hansen’s meetings with Gregory Rabinovich (“John”), the GPU’s chief for American operations, were not trivial or open to harmless interpretation, but were with one of Stalin’s most dangerous and strategically important agents. The KV files do not mention Hansen directly, nor do they need to. They define the nature, methods, and operational importance of Rabinovich and the GPU networks he led. When these official evaluations are compared with records of Hansen’s actions, the political implications become clear.

MI5’s Assessment of the GPU: A Professional Understanding of Stalinist Tradecraft

The KV series includes thousands of pages of MI5’s internal reports on Soviet espionage. These documents show that British intelligence had a deep understanding of GPU operations, such as penetrating émigré political groups, especially those opposed to Stalinism; using humanitarian or cultural organisations as cover for covert activities; deploying senior agents under diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic cover; cultivating “trusted comrades” within targeted organisations; and executing long-term infiltration plans that could last for decades.

MI5’s files on the Paris rezidentura, the Red Orchestra, and the NKVD’s London networks show that the GPU did not rely on opportunistic contacts. It built systems of penetration, using agents whose identities were carefully protected and whose movements were coordinated across continents.

This context is decisive. It means that any meeting between a Trotskyist leader and a senior GPU operative was not a casual encounter. It was an event of enormous operational significance.

Gregory Rabinovich (“John”) in MI5’s Files: A Senior GPU Architect

The KV files contain evaluations of Soviet agents working in the US and Europe. One of them is Gregory Rabinovich, known in GPU operations as “John.” MI5’s liaison reports with American intelligence describe Rabinovich as a senior NKVD officer, an organiser of covert networks in the Western Hemisphere, a handler of high-value agents and informants, a specialist in infiltrating anti-Stalinist groups, and a key player in operations against Trotskyists.

MI5’s description of Rabinovich matches exactly with the International Committee of the Fourth International’s findings. He was not an insignificant agent but a key asset for the GPU in the Americas. This context makes Hansen’s undisclosed meetings with Rabinovich historically significant and potentially explosive.

The Hansen–Rabinovich Meetings in Light of MI5’s KV Files

Hansen revealed—only after being caught—that he had met Rabinovich in New York in 1940. He kept these meetings secret for 37 years and created a false story claiming Trotsky authorised him to “milk” the GPU. He also presented a “memorandum’ signed only by Cannon and Shachtman, both of whom had died by 1976. Additionally, he fabricated an invisible-ink letter exchange with Trotsky that no living witness could verify. MI5’s KV files show that Hansen’s alibi is not credible.

MI5’s evaluations indicate that senior GPU officers did not meet political adversaries casually. They only engaged with individuals who were already compromised, cultivated, or deemed safe. As the ICFI stated in 1976: “It is beyond the realm of the possible to accept that Dr Gregory Rabinovitz … would jeopardise his valuable GPU cover … unless he was convinced that the man with whom he was meeting would not expose him.” MI5’s records support this professional assessment.

Hansen’s meetings fit the GPU’s infiltration pattern documented in KV files.

The KV series demonstrates that the GPU consistently engaged in behaviours such as approaching potential informants with benign pretexts, using “chance encounters” as operational cover, cultivating contacts within hostile organisations, exploiting personal vulnerabilities and political naivety, and depending on secrecy and compartmentalisation. Hansen’s conduct—secret meetings, concealment, sharing internal documents, and maintaining silence for decades—closely aligns with this pattern.

 MI5’s files contradict Renton’s minimisation

Renton suggests Hansen might have been seeking assistance to “catch Trotsky’s killer,” but MI5’s files show this idea is unfounded. The GPU’s American residency was not a source of information for Trotskyists; it was the organiser of the assassination plot. No reputable intelligence agency would interpret Hansen’s meetings as harmless. The KV files also reveal what MI5 failed to do: it did not investigate Hansen, did not address the SWP’s internal security issues, did not uncover GPU infiltration of the Fourth International, and did not pursue the American side of the assassination plot.

This silence is politically significant. Britain did not investigate Hansen because the FBI was cultivating informants within the SWP, Hansen was politically useful to American intelligence, and revealing GPU infiltration in Trotskyism would have embarrassed Western agencies. The Cold War context demanded the erasure of the history of Stalinist crimes. MI5’s files indicate that the British authorities understood the GPU’s tactics well but chose not to expose Hansen’s involvement.

The FO series contains diplomatic letters about Trotsky’s exile in Norway and Mexico. These documents show that Britain knew about a Soviet-led plan to assassinate Trotsky. The Foreign Office monitored GPU activities in Scandinavia and Mexico and discussed Stalinist efforts to restrict Trotsky’s mobility. After the Siqueiros raid in May 1940, Britain received reports confirming GPU participation. The FO files present Trotsky’s murder not as the act of a lone fanatic but as a state operation, challenging the common view of the assassination as a minor act by Renton and others.

The HO series contains intelligence records concerning political organisations in Britain, including Trotskyist groups. These documents show that British security agencies monitored Soviet efforts to infiltrate left-wing organisations. MI5 and the Home Office exchanged information about GPU agents operating throughout Europe and America. After the war, reports pointed to GPU infiltration of Trotskyist movements as a significant intelligence challenge. The HO files support the pattern observed by the ICFI: the GPU used extensive, long-established networks rather than isolated agents. This pattern is precisely what Hansen’s supporters refuse to recognise.

COI Files: Propaganda, Intelligence, and the Political Use of Silence

The COI (Central Office of Information) series includes wartime and post-war propaganda and intelligence coordination documents. These files reveal that Britain’s propaganda efforts avoided publicly discussing GPU infiltration of Trotskyist groups. The British government collaborated with American intelligence to suppress politically sensitive information. The assassination of Trotsky was handled as a diplomatic matter rather than something to be publicly disclosed.

The COI files reveal that political motives drove the silence: admitting GPU involvement in the Trotskyist movement would have exposed the cooperation of Western intelligence agencies, like the FBI, which had informants within the SWP. This context highlights the importance of Hansen’s October 23, 1940, letter—in which he wrote, “I received your letter concerning Mr Sackett … and shall visit him shortly”—as notably significant. Sackett was the FBI’s chief in the New York District. Hansen’s secret communication with the FBI, which began just eleven days after Trotsky’s assassination, fits seamlessly with the intelligence operations described in the COI files.

What the British State Did Not Investigate: The Silence That Speaks

The Kew archives notably lack records of investigations into Hansen’s contacts with the FBI or GPU, inquiries into the SWP’s internal security issues, or efforts to trace the American side of the assassination plan. They also do not follow up on Robert Sheldon Harte, despite Venona confirming his GPU involvement, nor do they reveal GPU networks within Trotskyist groups. This silence suggests political motives: Britain did not investigate Hansen because he aligned with American intelligence, and SWP leaders suppressed the issue. Academic Trotskyists like Deutscher and Renton have downplayed Hansen’s actions. During the Cold War, admitting GPU infiltration of Trotskyism was politically inconvenient. The archives support the ICFI’s key point: the cover-up was both organisational and international.

The Historical and Political Stakes

The assassination of Leon Trotsky is arguably the most consequential political killing of the twentieth century. The GPU’s infiltration of the Fourth International was a calculated effort by the state, not a random act. Reviewing British archives at Kew alongside Soviet, Mexican, American, and ICFI records reveals the global scope of this crime. Renton’s methods—marked by fragmentation, speculation, and minimisation—are inconsistent with the archival evidence. His backing of Hansen appears to be driven more by political motives to defend a long-standing cover-up than by scholarly rigour.

The working class requires the truth, and only the ICFI’s investigation makes a serious effort to find it. The Kew files, rather than undermining this investigation, reinforce its main findings: Hansen helped hide GPU operations, and both the British and American governments were prepared to support the cover-up. The effort to uncover the truth about Trotsky’s murder is deeply connected to the current ongoing fight to build revolutionary leadership among the working class.