John Cooper Clarke has always seemed slightly out of time, a figure who emerged fully formed from the late 1970s, as though spat out by the collapsing industrial North with a pair of drainpipes, a shock of hair and a voice that could turn complaint into incantation. He arrived as Britain’s postwar industrial base began to disintegrate, as the mills and factories that had shaped whole cities closed their doors, and as the working class that sustained them entered a period of historic defeat. Clarke’s style rapid‑fire rhyme, deadpan delivery, the ability to turn squalor into something approaching music felt inseparable from that world. It still does.
Now 77, he’s back on the road. His 20‑date tour of Britain and Ireland, running through October and November, accompanies Have It, his new collection. It follows WHAT (2024), the surprise bestseller that confirmed Clarke’s unlikely status as a national treasure. In 2025, he became the first poet to headline a British arena, taking the stage at Manchester’s Co‑op Live. He received a Northern Music Award. His poems appear on the national curriculum. The man who once read between sets by the Fall and the Buzzcocks, a poet of pubs, bedsits and bus shelters, is now part of the cultural establishment.
This transformation is not merely biographical. It is historical. Clarke’s career spans the period in which the working class that produced him was first defeated, then sentimentalised, and finally repackaged as cultural heritage. His rise tells a story not only about poetry but about Britain itself, about what has been lost, what has been preserved, and what has been embalmed. The industrial North that shaped his voice has been hollowed out, its communities fragmented by deindustrialisation, austerity and decades of political betrayal. Yet its image has been revived as a marketable aesthetic: gritty authenticity, northern humour, the romance of decline.
Clarke stands at the centre of this contradiction. He is both chronicler and exhibit, both witness to working‑class life and participant in its commodification. His success reflects his talent, but it also reflects a culture that has learned to celebrate the working class only after stripping it of political content. To understand Clarke’s late career and the new collection he now tours is to understand the Britain that made him, and the Britain that now sells him back to itself.
The contradictions of success
Clarke’s popularity is real and, in many ways, deserved. Few living writers have captured the physical and moral texture of postwar working‑class life with such precision. “Beasley Street” (1980) remains one of the most vivid portraits of urban dereliction in late‑industrial Britain: a place where “the rats have all got rickets” and “the men get drunk on Friday / And go to church on Sunday.” The poem smells of damp brick, chip‑shop fat, and the hopelessness of a city abandoned by capital.
Decades later, Clarke rewrote it as “Beasley Boulevard,” a sardonic commentary on regeneration, property speculation and the hollow promises of the new urbanism. The slum has been “revitalised,” but the underlying social reality remains unchanged. Taken together, the two poems form a kind of diptych: the industrial city as Thatcher left it, and the “revitalised” neighbourhood as Blair imagined it. Clarke’s work records, with bitter humour, the passage from one form of decline to another.
“Evidently Chickentown,” his breathless catalogue of frustration, still resonates with anyone who has lived on a run‑down estate. Its relentless rhythm, the piling up of grievances until they become absurd, captures something essential about life in a society where everything is broken but nothing changes.
His audiences, many of them working people in their fifties and sixties alongside younger fans drawn in through the Arctic Monkeys or The Sopranos, do not come for nostalgia. They come because Clarke describes their world accurately and treats it as worth describing. In a culture dominated by middle‑class self‑absorption, that is no small thing.
Yet the circumstances of the current tour cannot be ignored. At some venues, boxes cost close to £50 a head. The poet of the bedsit and the bus shelter is now marketed with the full apparatus of the entertainment industry. That apparatus turns rebellion into a brand. Clarke’s “trademark look” becomes a fashion item; his history in the deindustrialised North becomes a heritage attraction. None of this is his fault. It does, however, say something about how far the cultural layers that once called themselves “punk” have come to terms with the existing order.
The politics of form
The deeper issue is one of outlook. Clarke’s comedy targets the grim surface of capitalist society: the decaying high street, the brutal landlord, the pretensions of the newly rich. It rarely asks why that surface exists, or what social force might change it. His characteristic attitude is a wry, sometimes affectionate disgust. The world is absurd and squalid, and the best one can do is name it brilliantly.
That attitude belongs to its period. It was formed in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the defeat of the miners, the betrayals of the Labour and trade‑union bureaucracies, and the collapse of any mass socialist perspective in the working class. Many artists of that generation responded by withdrawing into irony. Clarke, gifted as he is, was no exception.
Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution that an artist’s form cannot be separated from the social soil that produced it. Clarke’s form the rapid‑fire rhyming list, the deadpan turn, the punchline that resets everything is extraordinarily effective at depicting a static world. It is less effective at depicting a world in motion.
This is not a moral failing. It is a historical one. Clarke’s technique embodies the period’s political exhaustion that shaped him. The rapid‑fire rhyme reduces the world to surface impressions; the list‑poem structure accumulates detail without development; the punchline ending offers closure without resolution. Everything resets. Nothing changes. It is the perfect form for a society in which the working class has been defeated and the future cancelled.
A world in motion
But the world is now moving fast. It arrives in a Britain of food banks, collapsing public services and wages eroded by years of inflation. The new Labour government continues austerity in name only. Councils go bankrupt while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. Young workers in Salford today confront conditions that Clarke’s original Beasley Street would recognise all too well.
The question, then, is whether Clarke’s new collection engages seriously with this situation, or offers more of the beloved routines. The tour publicity promises new material “alongside” fan favourites, a pairing that hints at the risk any veteran performer faces: being preserved in aspic by an audience that expects him to remain unchanged.
The cultural establishment and its limits
Clarke’s elevation to establishment status is not merely a personal triumph. It reflects a broader cultural pattern. Over the past two decades, Britain has developed a taste for working‑class authenticity provided it is safely packaged, politically neutral and available for consumption. The “heritage” version of the industrial North, with its flat caps, brass bands and gritty humour, has become a staple of television, advertising and tourism.
Clarke fits this pattern uneasily. His work is too sharp, too bitter, too accurate to be fully assimilated. But the industry tries anyway. The result is a strange double image: Clarke as both chronicler of decline and symbol of cultural resilience; both outsider and institution; both rebel and brand.
This contradiction is not his doing. It reflects a society that has lost the ability to imagine working‑class life except as nostalgia or entertainment. Clarke’s success testifies to his talent. It also reflects a culture that celebrates the working class only after stripping it of political content.
What remains
John Cooper Clarke’s late career invites a kind of double vision. On the one hand, he remains what he always was: a poet of the streets, a chronicler of the derelict and the absurd, a performer whose voice still carries the rhythms of the industrial North, decades after the factories fell silent. On the other hand, he has become an institution — celebrated, packaged, and circulated through the cultural economy as a symbol of working‑class authenticity. The tension between these two identities is not a personal contradiction but a historical one. It reflects the fate of the class that produced him, and how its memory is now used.
Clarke’s achievement is undeniable. For half a century he has insisted, against the grain of literary fashion, that poetry belongs not in seminar rooms but in pubs, clubs, and the mouths of people who were never meant to read it. He has given form to experiences official culture prefers to ignore: the damp bedsit, the boarded‑up shopfront, the petty humiliations of poverty, and the bleak humour that helps people endure them. In a society that often pathologises or sentimentalises working-class life, Clarke’s refusal to prettify anything becomes a moral stance.
Yet the limits of his work are inseparable from its strengths. Clarke’s form — the rapid‑fire rhyme, the list that piles up grievances until they become comic, the punchline that resets everything — is perfectly suited to depicting a static world. It is less suited to depicting a world in motion. His characteristic attitude, a wry and sometimes affectionate disgust, arose in a period when the working class had suffered historic defeats and no longer saw itself as a force capable of changing society. Irony became a refuge, and Clarke, like many artists of his generation, made brilliance out of resignation.
The world that produced that resignation has changed. Britain today is not merely shabby; it is unstable. Food banks proliferate, councils go bankrupt, wages stagnate, and public services collapse. A Labour government administers austerity with technocratic efficiency while military budgets rise. Across Europe, the far right exploits the anger that the official “left” has abandoned. The conditions Clarke described in “Beasley Street” have not disappeared; they have deepened and spread. But they no longer appear as permanent features of a static landscape. They appear as symptoms of a widening, accelerating crisis.
Whether Clarke’s new collection, Have It, engages with this reality is an open question. The tour promises new material “alongside” fan favourites — a pairing that suggests both continuity and risk. Audiences often want their icons to remain unchanged, and the entertainment industry is adept at preserving artists in cultural aspic. Yet Clarke shares the spotlight with younger poets like Toria Garbutt, one of the most compelling working-class voices to emerge from the post-industrial North in recent years. Born and raised in Yorkshire’s mining towns, her poetry confronts poverty, addiction, domestic violence, and the long aftermath of deindustrialisation with an honesty that avoids both sentimentality and despair. Garbutt’s work carries the cadence of the communities she writes about — sharp, musical, often darkly funny, and rooted in lived experience rather than cultural nostalgia. While Clarke’s generation often turned to irony in response to political defeat, Garbutt writes from within the social wreckage it produced, giving form to realities official culture still prefers to ignore. Her presence on Clarke’s tour is more than a support slot: it signals that the tradition of working-class poetry he helped popularise has not only survived but is being renewed by artists shaped by a different, harsher era.
Clarke’s limitations are not personal but historical. They reflect the exhaustion of a generation that saw the working class defeated and never saw it rise again. The revival of class struggle now visible across Britain and Europe will produce new artists, new forms, and new perspectives. It may also reveal the limits of those who made resignation into an aesthetic. Clarke’s best work captured the world as it was. Artists today must capture the world as it is becoming—and the forces that might change it.
Bibliography
Books and Collections
Clarke, John Cooper. Have It. London: Picador, 2026.
Clarke, John Cooper. WHAT. London: Picador, 2024.
Clarke, John Cooper. Ten Years in an Open-Necked Shirt. London: Arena, 1983.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Translated by Rose Strunsky. London: Red Star Press, 1970.
Poems
Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Street.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.
Clarke, John Cooper. “Beasley Boulevard.” Zipcode. London: Vintage, 2013.
Clarke, John Cooper. “Evidently Chickentown.” Snap, Crackle & Bop. CBS Records, 1980.
Articles and Interviews
Brown, Helen. “John Cooper Clarke: The Bard of Salford Still Has It.” The Telegraph, 2025.
Simpson, Dave. “Punk’s Poet Laureate on Fame, Failure and the North.” The Guardian, 2024.
O’Hagan, Sean. “The Last of the Working‑Class Poets?” The Observer, 2023.
Context and History
Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994.
Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1999.
Stewart, Paul. Deindustrialisation and the Working Class in Britain. Manchester: MUP, 2018.
A Marxist Intervention into a Degraded Political Literature
Over the past decade, an enormous, largely superficial literature on Donald Trump has accumulated. It comprises memoirs by disillusioned staffers, psychological profiles, insider gossip, and endless liberal laments over violated norms. Yet this genre seldom asks the only question that matters to anyone seeking to understand the crisis of American democracy: In whose class interests does Trump rule? The new Mehring Books volume, *Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy*, edited by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, puts that question at the centre of its analysis and answers it with uncompromising clarity.
North’s foreword opens by rejecting the two dominant bourgeois explanations for Trump’s rise. The first, favoured by the liberal establishment, casts Trump as a monstrous aberration—a freakish intrusion into an otherwise healthy democratic system. The second, its reactionary mirror image, depicts him as a demonic political genius, a singular figure imposing his will on a helpless nation. Both explanations share the same flaw: they reduce a profound social process to one individual’s personality, obscuring the class forces that produced Trump and the material interests he serves.
Against these illusions, the volume insists on a historical materialist truth: Trump is not the cause of oligarchic rule but its political instrument. He did not create the conditions for authoritarianism; he emerged from them. His ascent reflects the interests of a financial oligarchy whose wealth and power have grown to grotesque proportions and whose relationship with democratic forms of rule has become openly hostile.
The book uses stark figures to make this reality clear. More than 900 American billionaires now control roughly $8.2 trillion—nearly twice the wealth of the population’s bottom half. Their political interventions are decisive, not symbolic. In 2024, Elon Musk spent more than $250 million to return Trump to the White House. It was rewarded with the Department of Government Efficiency, which he used to dismantle regulatory agencies and social programmes. Musk was not alone: Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos, who had cultivated a liberal image for years, aligned themselves with a would-be dictator. They concluded that authoritarian rule would protect their wealth more reliably than the decaying institutions of bourgeois democracy.
This is the central argument of *Oligarchy*: Trumpism is not a departure from American capitalism, but its logical outcome amid terminal decline. The book places Trump’s rise within a half-century of economic and political degeneration. It examines the end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, the collapse of the postwar monetary order, decades of deindustrialisation, the trade union bureaucracy’s suppression of class struggle, the growth of financial parasitism, and the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which removed the last external restraint on American militarism. Trump did not create these processes; he is their political crystallisation.
By grounding its analysis in class relations rather than personality cults, the volume cuts through the fog of liberal moralism and reactionary mythmaking. It demonstrates that the crisis of American democracy cannot be understood through psychological speculation or appeals to civic virtue. It must be understood as the political expression of a ruling class that has become irreconcilably hostile to democratic constraints.
In this sense, *Oligarchy* is more than a book about Trump: it examines the social order that produced him and warns that defending democratic rights requires a struggle against the oligarchic power he represents. For workers and young people seeking to understand how American democracy reached its current state, this volume is indispensable.
The Oligarchs Behind the Throne
The book marshals figures that reveal Trumpism’s real social foundation. More than nine hundred American billionaires now control approximately eight point two trillion dollars—nearly twice the wealth held by the bottom half of the population. This concentration of wealth is no incidental feature of contemporary capitalism; it is the essential precondition for the political phenomena the book analyses. Trumpism is rooted in the interests of a ruling class whose fortunes have reached levels incompatible with democratic rule. The oligarchs who dominate American society have concluded that the traditional mechanisms of bourgeois democracy no longer reliably defend their wealth. Their turn toward authoritarianism is not a matter of personal preference, but of class necessity.
The book offers concrete examples of this oligarchic layer’s direct intervention in politics. In 2024, Elon Musk spent more than $250 million to help return Trump to the White House. In return, he gained the Department of Government Efficiency, a new bureaucratic instrument he used to dismantle regulatory bodies, social programmes, and environmental protections. Musk’s actions were not the eccentricities of one billionaire; they formed part of a coordinated movement among the financial elite. Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos, who had cultivated a liberal image for years, also threw their support behind Trump. Bezos’s shift was especially revealing: his earlier image as a socially progressive billionaire collapsed when preserving his wealth required authoritarian rule. The book shows that these figures did not merely support Trump as individuals. They represented a class whose interests were threatened by political instability and growing anger among the working population.
The oligarchs concluded that the decaying institutions of bourgeois democracy could no longer guarantee their dominance. Trump was their solution. He offered a form of rule that dispensed with the constraints of constitutional procedure and replaced them with executive fiat, militarised repression, and the cultivation of a fascist movement. The book argues that Trumpism is not an aberration but the political expression of a ruling class that has exhausted the democratic forms through which it once governed. The oligarchs did not choose Trump because he was charismatic or ideologically aligned with them. They chose him because he was willing to act as the instrument of their interests, and because his contempt for democratic norms made him uniquely suited to the tasks they required.
The book situates this development within a broader historical trajectory. The rise of Trumpism is inseparable from the long decline of American capitalism. The end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, the collapse of the postwar monetary order, decades of deindustrialisation, the trade union bureaucracy’s suppression of class struggle, and the hypertrophy of financial parasitism created a social landscape defined by inequality, insecurity, and political decay. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 removed the last external restraint on American militarism and opened a period of unending war. These processes eroded the foundations of democratic governance and produced a ruling class increasingly reliant on coercion rather than consent.
In this context, the oligarchs’ support for Trump appears not as a sudden departure but as the culmination of a long process. The book shows that the financial elite did not merely tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. They encouraged them, financed them, and integrated them into the machinery of the state. Their actions reveal a ruling class that has abandoned any commitment to democratic principles and embraced a form of governance that protects its wealth through repression and violence.
The book’s analysis is therefore not limited to Trump as an individual. It is a study of the social order that produced him. It demonstrates that the crisis of American democracy cannot be understood through psychological speculation or moral condemnation. It must be understood as the political expression of a ruling class whose interests have become irreconcilable with democratic constraints. Trumpism is the form of rule that emerges when oligarchic wealth reaches a point where democracy becomes an obstacle rather than a mechanism of governance.
A History Written in Real Time
The book’s distinctive value lies in its method. It is not a retrospective reconstruction shaped by hindsight or by the smoothing effects of historical distance. It is a chronicle written as events unfolded, drawn from thousands of articles, statements, and lectures published by the World Socialist Web Site between 2015 and 2026. Each text was produced when the outcome of events was still uncertain, the political crisis was developing in real time, and the broader public had not yet fully recognised the dangers confronting the working class. Read sequentially, these documents form a running record of a political catastrophe. They show how a Marxist analysis, rooted in class relations rather than personality cults, made it possible to identify the emergence of a fascist conspiracy at a time when the media and political establishment dismissed it as bluster or theatrical excess.
The book shows that the WSWS could foresee the trajectory of Trumpism because it treated the phenomenon not as a psychological curiosity but as the political expression of deep historical processes. The rise of Trump is situated within the long decline of American capitalism, a decline that unfolded over half a century and reshaped every aspect of social and political life. The volume traces this decline through several decisive stages. It begins with the end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, which shattered the postwar monetary order and inaugurated a period of financial instability. It examines the decades of deindustrialisation that followed, during which entire regions of the United States were stripped of their industrial base and millions of workers were thrown into economic insecurity.
The book also analyses how the trade union bureaucracy suppressed class struggle, transforming unions from defensive working-class organisations into instruments of corporate management. This suppression created a political vacuum that reactionary forces could exploit. The hypertrophy of financial parasitism further intensified the crisis. The growth of speculative capital, Wall Street’s dominance over productive industry, and the economy’s transformation into a mechanism for enriching a narrow elite produced levels of inequality incompatible with democratic stability.
Finally, the volume emphasises the significance of the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991. This event removed the last external restraint on American militarism and opened a period of unbroken war. The United States embarked on a global campaign of military interventions, coups, and occupations, and the methods used abroad increasingly shaped domestic political life. The erosion of democratic norms, the expansion of executive power, and the militarisation of the state were not accidental developments. They were the internal consequences of imperialist policy.
This is the historical terrain on which Trump emerged. The book shows that you cannot understand his rise apart from these long-term processes. Trumpism is not an aberration but the political crystallisation of a declining social order. The WSWS recognised this because it analysed events through the lens of class struggle and historical materialism. The book’s method is therefore inseparable from its conclusions. It demonstrates that only a Marxist perspective can make sense of the crisis of American democracy and reveal the forces driving it toward authoritarian rule.
Part One (2015–2020): The Social Roots of Trumpism
Part One examines the conditions that produced Trump. It begins from the premise that his rise cannot be understood apart from the social devastation inflicted on the American working class, the bipartisan commitment to imperialist war, and the Democratic Party’s promotion of identity politics as a substitute for any challenge to capitalist power. The book shows that Trump did not emerge from a political vacuum. He arose from a society marked by inequality, militarism, and the systematic suppression of class struggle. These conditions were not created by one party or one administration. They were the cumulative product of decades in which both parties of the ruling class dismantled social protections, enriched the financial elite, and cultivated forms of politics that obscured the real sources of social misery.
A central contribution of the WSWS during this period was its early rejection of the slander, promoted by Democrats and the media, that Trump was the creation of a reactionary white working class. This narrative served two essential purposes. First, it absolved the two-party system of responsibility for the social catastrophe it had produced. By blaming workers for Trump’s rise, the political establishment avoided any examination of the policies that had destroyed jobs, gutted communities, and created the conditions for widespread anger. Second, it redirected popular anger downward, away from the financial elite from which Trump himself emerged. The myth of the reactionary worker transformed legitimate social grievances into a moral failing. It let the ruling class present itself as democracy’s defender against the very people it had impoverished.
The book shows that this narrative was not merely false but politically dangerous. It obscured the real class forces behind Trump and prevented any serious analysis of the authoritarian tendencies developing within the state. The WSWS insisted that Trump’s base was not the working class but sections of the petty bourgeoisie, elements of the police and military, and layers of the financial elite who saw in him a vehicle for their interests. This analysis shows the first term not as chaotic improvisation but as the deliberate laying of foundations for a fascist movement.
The first term witnessed the growth of armed militias, the encouragement of vigilante violence, and the cultivation of a political culture defined by resentment and nationalism. Anti-immigrant agitation became a central organising principle of the administration, used to divide workers and legitimise the expansion of state repression. Executive power grew rapidly, with Trump asserting the right to override legal constraints and govern through decree. These developments were not isolated episodes. They formed part of a coherent political strategy to create a movement capable of overturning democratic norms and establishing a form of rule suited to the oligarchy’s needs.
Part One therefore provides more than a chronicle of events. It offers a framework for understanding how social decay, political opportunism, and class interests combined to produce a movement that threatened the foundations of American democracy. It shows that Trumpism was not an accident but the expression of a ruling class that had lost confidence in democratic mechanisms and turned toward authoritarian solutions.
Part Two: The 2020 Coup and Its Cover‑Up
Part Two reconstructs the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and shows that January 6 was not an eruption of spontaneous chaos but the culmination of a coordinated effort to nullify the vote and impose authoritarian rule. The book presents January 6 as the endpoint of a months-long plot involving parts of the Republican Party, layers of the state apparatus, and influential figures in the financial elite. Trump was the figurehead of this operation, but he was not its sole architect. The conspiracy developed through legal challenges, pressure campaigns, the mobilisation of fascist groups, and the deliberate creation of conditions in which violence could be used to achieve political ends.
The WSWS identified this danger early because it analysed the unfolding crisis through the lens of class interests rather than through the personal behaviour of Trump. The book shows that the coup attempt was rooted in the needs of an oligarchy that viewed democratic procedures as an obstacle to its wealth and power. The refusal to accept the election results was not a psychological reaction but a political strategy. It aimed to create a precedent for overturning future elections and to establish a form of rule in which executive authority could override constitutional constraints.
The Biden administration’s response is presented as a cover-up. By reducing the conspiracy to the actions of one man and a mob, Biden shielded the network of officials, financiers, and Republican leaders who orchestrated the plot. The administration insisted that the country needed a strong Republican Party, even as that party had just attempted to overturn an election. The January 6 committee spent eighteen months narrowing its investigation until it resembled a criminal case against a single individual rather than an examination of a broad political conspiracy. This approach protected the stability of the two-party system and kept from exposure the class interests that drove the coup attempt.
The book argues that the cover-up was not a failure of political courage but a deliberate act. The Democratic Party shares with the Republicans a commitment to defending oligarchic wealth and American imperialism. To expose the real forces behind January 6 would have required confronting the financial elite, the military and police apparatus, and the political structures that sustain capitalist rule. The Democrats chose instead to present the coup as an aberration, a moment of madness, rather than as the logical outcome of decades of social decay and political reaction.
Eric London’s August 2021 lecture on the social origins of the conspiracy stands out as one of the volume’s most incisive analyses. London traces the roots of the coup attempt to the long decline of American capitalism, rising social inequality, and the ruling class’s increasing reliance on authoritarian methods. He shows that January 6 was not an isolated event but part of a broader movement toward oligarchic rule. His lecture provides the theoretical foundation for understanding why the coup occurred and why the political establishment refused to confront its real causes. Part Two therefore offers more than a narrative of January 6. It provides a framework for understanding the breakdown of American democracy and the class forces driving it.
Part Three: The Second Term and the Open Dictatorship of the Oligarchy
Part Three chronicles the second Trump administration and presents it as the moment when the oligarchy assumed direct command of the state. The book shows that the first term’s authoritarian tendencies not only intensified but also became systematised. What had previously been preparatory measures became the foundation of a new form of rule. The administration operated on the premise that democratic norms were obstacles to be circumvented and that preserving oligarchic wealth required using state power in its most coercive form.
One defining feature of the second term was the declaration of a state of exception. Drawn from the theory of authoritarian rule, this concept refers to a situation in which the executive claims the right to suspend legal constraints in the name of national security or public order. The book shows that this declaration did not respond to any genuine emergency. It was a political instrument used to concentrate power in the presidency and create a legal environment in which repression could occur without accountability. The state of exception became the framework through which the administration justified its actions, from domestic deployments to foreign interventions.
The book documents the deployment of ICE paramilitaries and federal troops into American cities. These forces were used not to protect the population but to intimidate it. Their presence in urban centres signalled a shift from traditional policing to militarised occupation. The administration relied on these units to suppress protests, break strikes, and enforce executive directives. The use of paramilitary forces against civilians revealed the extent to which the state had been transformed into an instrument of oligarchic rule.
The killings carried out by federal agents, including the atrocities in Minneapolis in January 2026, are presented as emblematic of this transformation. The book treats these events not as isolated abuses but as expressions of a political strategy that relied on terror to maintain control. The violence in Minneapolis demonstrated the willingness of the administration to use lethal force against the population and the inability of existing institutions to restrain it. The response of the political establishment, which sought to minimise or justify the killings, further exposed the complicity of both parties in the erosion of democratic rights.
The second term also saw the illegal invasion of Venezuela. This action was justified through familiar rhetoric about restoring order and promoting democracy, but the book shows that its real purpose was to secure strategic and economic interests. The invasion marked a new stage in American imperialism, one in which military aggression was carried out without even the pretence of congressional oversight. The war against Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, followed the same pattern. It was an act of aggression driven by geopolitical calculations and carried out solely under the executive’s authority.
Part Three presents these developments as the anatomy of an authoritarian regime serving capitalist interests. It shows that the second Trump administration did not merely violate democratic norms. It replaced them with a system of rule designed to protect the oligarchy’s wealth and power through repression, militarism, and the dismantling of constitutional constraints.
Accomplices and Enablers: Republicans, Democrats, and the Pseudo‑Left
The book’s most politically significant sections focus not on Trump himself but on the forces that made his rise possible. Trump did not ascend to power through personal magnetism or ideological coherence. A ruling class saw him as a useful instrument, and political institutions that had long abandoned democratic principles elevated him. The book therefore turns its attention to the Republicans, the Democrats, and the pseudo-left, showing how each played an indispensable role in the breakdown of American democracy.
The Republicans are presented as willing accomplices. They embraced Trump as the vehicle for oligarchic rule and recognised that his contempt for democratic norms aligned with their own strategic interests. The party leadership understood that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies could be harnessed to implement policies that enriched the financial elite, expanded military power, and dismantled regulatory constraints. The book shows that Republican support for Trump was not reluctant or tactical. It was enthusiastic and rooted in a shared class outlook. Trump did not cause the party’s transformation into an openly reactionary force. It predated him and made his rise possible.
The book portrays the Democrats as indispensable enablers. The book argues that the Democratic Party is ruthless against opponents on its left but impotent against Trump because it shares his commitment to defending capitalist wealth and American imperialism. The record is damning. After the 2016 election, Barack Obama described the contest as a scrimmage between members of the same team, revealing how both parties operate within a shared ideological framework. Two days after the events of January 6, Joe Biden declared that the country needed a strong Republican Party, even though that party had just attempted to overturn an election. The January 6 committee spent eighteen months reducing a broad conspiracy to the crimes of one man, thereby shielding the network of officials, financiers, and political operatives who orchestrated the plot. The Biden administration served as an interregnum devoted to securing bipartisan support for war in Ukraine and for policies that contributed to the suffering of civilians in Gaza. These actions show that the Democrats’ primary concern was not defending democratic institutions but preserving the stability of the two-party system and protecting the interests of the ruling class.
The book also examines the role of the pseudo-left. Figures such as Bernie Sanders denounced the billionaire class in rhetoric but ultimately reinforced the Democratic Party’s authority. Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and later offered to work with Trump, signalling his willingness to subordinate social opposition to the needs of the political establishment. Jacobin, the magazine associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, avoided the coup almost entirely. Its silence reflected a political orientation that prioritised access to the Democratic Party over any serious confrontation with the forces threatening democratic rights. The pseudo-left is presented as a political tendency that channels social anger back into bourgeois political structures and prevents the emergence of an independent working-class movement.
By analysing these forces together, the book shows that Trumpism was not an isolated phenomenon. It expressed a political system in which both major parties and their ideological satellites had abandoned any commitment to democratic principles. The Republicans acted as the architects of authoritarian rule. The Democrats provided the cover that allowed it to develop—the pseudo-left neutralised opposition from below. Trump benefited from this alignment, but the forces that sustained him were far larger and far more dangerous than any individual.
The Social Opposition and the Question of Leadership
Against this record of capitulation from the political establishment, the book documents a continuous and determined opposition from below. It begins with the mass protests that erupted on Trump’s first day in office, demonstrations that revealed a broad social revulsion toward authoritarianism and inequality. It continues through the multiracial uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd, an eruption of anger that exposed the brutality of the American state and the depth of social injustice. The book then turns to the No Kings demonstrations of 2025 and 2026, the largest single-day protests in American history, in which millions rejected attempts to impose monarchical or dictatorial rule. These movements were spontaneous, diverse, and often politically inchoate, but they expressed a profound social reality. The objective basis for a mass socialist movement exists. What is missing is conscious revolutionary leadership.
The programme advanced by the volume is therefore clear and uncompromising. It calls for forming rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy, which has long served as an instrument of corporate management and a barrier to genuine working-class struggle. It insists on the working class’s political independence from both capitalist parties, rejecting the illusion that the Democratic Party can serve as a vehicle for social reform or democratic renewal. It advocates the international unification of workers in the struggle against war and fascism on a socialist programme, recognising that the crisis of American democracy is inseparable from the global crisis of capitalism and cannot be resolved within national boundaries.
The book situates this programme within a broader historical framework. It appears on the eve of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, a moment that invites reflection on the democratic principles that shaped the nation’s origins. The volume argues that a ruling class openly contemptuous of 1776’s egalitarian ideals now governs the country. The commitment to popular sovereignty, equality, and resistance to tyranny that animated the first American Revolution has been replaced by a political order defined by oligarchic wealth, militarism, and authoritarianism.
The book connects this contempt to the WSWS’s polemic against the New York Times’ 1619 Project. That project sought to recast the American Revolution and the Civil War as episodes in an eternal racial conflict, stripping them of their democratic content and obscuring their significance as revolutionary struggles. The volume argues that such interpretations serve the interests of a ruling class that wishes to sever the working class from its own revolutionary heritage. By reducing the past to racial antagonism, the 1619 Project denies the possibility of universal emancipation and undermines the historical foundations of a socialist movement.
The democratic principles of the first two American revolutions can be defended and extended only by a third. The book insists that the working class must conquer political power and reorganise economic life on socialist foundations. This is not a rhetorical flourish but a historical conclusion drawn from the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. The concentration of wealth, the militarisation of society, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the descent into perpetual war have created conditions in which democratic rights cannot survive without a fundamental transformation of the social order. The working class must complete the unfinished tasks of American history by establishing a society based on equality, rational planning, and collective ownership.
The book closes with a fictional Letter from Afar by Abraham Lincoln. This device allows the authors to draw a direct line between the moral and political struggles of the nineteenth century and those of the present. In the letter, Lincoln argues that capitalism today is as intolerable as slavery was in his time. He insists that Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and that the real enemy is a social system that produces inequality, violence, and authoritarianism. The letter reminds us that the fight for democracy has always required revolutionary action and that the working class must assume the role once played by the abolitionists and the soldiers of the Union Army.
The book’s conclusion is stark and unambiguous. Humanity faces a choice between fascism and socialism. Reforms, appeals to civility, and reliance on existing political institutions cannot resolve the crisis of American democracy. It requires a conscious working-class movement, armed with a socialist programme and guided by historical understanding. Oligarchy is essential reading for every worker and young person seeking to understand how American democracy reached this point and what must be done to prevent catastrophe. It calls for action and warns that today’s choices will determine the future.
Bibliography
North, David, ed.Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.
North, David. “Foreword.” In Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.
London, Eric. “The Social Origins of the January 6 Conspiracy.” Lecture delivered August 2021. World Socialist Web Site.
International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site. Articles, statements, and analyses published between 2015 and 2026. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org
World Socialist Web Site. Coverage of the 2020 election crisis, the January 6 coup attempt, and the second Trump administration. https://www.wsws.org
World Socialist Web Site. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Falsification of History.” Series of articles and critiques, 2019–2020.
North, David.The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.
North, David.The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political and Social Roots of the Breakdown. Mehring Books, 2024.
Mehring Books. Publications on American politics, imperialism, and the crisis of capitalism, 2015–2026. https://mehring.com
Federal Reserve Data. Wealth distribution statistics for American billionaires and the bottom half of the population, 2024–2026.
Public campaign finance records. Documentation of political contributions by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos, 2023–2024.
United States Department of Defence. Public statements and records relating to military operations in Venezuela and Iran, 2025–2026.
United States Department of Homeland Security. Public records concerning ICE deployments and federal paramilitary actions, 2025–2026.
Historical sources on the American Revolution and Civil War—primary documents from 1776 and 1861, including speeches, letters, and constitutional debates.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Letter from Afar.” Fictional reconstruction in Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.
Pip: A 244-page government report concludes that English football generates nine billion pounds a year and nearly every club loses money — and calls this a paradox. freerein61 has a different word for it.
Mara: The post is a Marxist reading of the Independent Football Regulator's State of the Game report, covering financialisation, ownership, labour, and what a regulator can and cannot do. Let's start with the report itself and what it actually reveals.
Bread, Circuses and Balance Sheets: The IFR's Report and Capitalist Football
Pip: The IFR presents its State of the Game report as sober, technocratic analysis — a neutral audit of English football's finances. The post's argument is that the document is actually something more uncomfortable: an accidental indictment of the system the regulator was built to protect.
Mara: The post frames it this way: "Its authors describe a 'paradox' at the heart of the sport: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency. A Marxist analysis shows there is no paradox at all. What the IFR calls a puzzle is simply capitalism's logic asserting itself with brutal clarity."
Pip: That reframe is the spine of the whole piece. If the wealth and the insolvency are not separate phenomena but two sides of the same process, then the regulator's toolkit — stress tests, action plans, enhanced oversight — is aimed at the wrong target entirely.
Mara: The numbers bear that out. Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold since 1992, but costs have risen faster. Ninety-four per cent of clubs in the top five divisions lose money. The post notes that seventeen EFL and National League clubs would lose money even if they paid their players nothing — which rather undercuts the report's framing of wage inflation as the root cause.
Pip: So the disease is structural, and the regulator is prescribing paracetamol.
Mara: On financialisation specifically, the data are striking. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years. One point two billion pounds in future transfer receipts has already been sold. Interest payments have quadrupled. Five lenders control 93.6 per cent of the transfer finance market. The post reads this as fictitious capital in Marx's strict sense — value that does not yet exist, monetised and spent before it is earned.
Pip: Clubs selling tomorrow's income to survive today's arms race. The post is clear that this is not mismanagement; it is what the structure compels.
Mara: Ownership tells a similar story. Non-domestic owners control 75 per cent of Premier League revenue. North American capital controls nearly half the pyramid. The average indicative return across clubs is minus 41 per cent, yet capital keeps flowing in. The post argues this is not irrational — football offers soft power, speculative upside, and, as the IFR itself notes, exposure to money laundering through offshore structures and opaque sponsorship arrangements.
Pip: A loss-making investment that doubles as a geopolitical branding exercise and a conduit for surplus capital. The post also takes the regulator's own stated priorities as evidence of its limits — its first distribution goal is preserving the Premier League as the world's leading league, and the top club earns 605 times the revenue of the smallest National League side.
Mara: Engels described the capitalist state as the "ideal collective capitalist" — managing the system's common affairs to preserve it as a whole. The post applies that framework directly to the IFR: a regulator the Premier League endorsed, whose tools stop well short of challenging debt dependency, multi-club ownership, or the private model itself.
Pip: Fans get a voice, not a vote. Supporters must be "considered." The post's alternative — pooled broadcast income, debt caps, 50-plus-one ownership, community control of grounds — is framed not as utopian but as the minimum required to reverse what the report documents.
Mara: The closing argument is that the IFR has produced the most detailed evidence yet of football's transformation into a financial asset class, while its prescriptions aim only to make that asset class more orderly. The regulator can manage symptoms; it cannot cure the disease.
Pip: Which means the most damning thing about the report is not what it gets wrong — it's how much it gets right, and what it refuses to conclude.
Mara: The IFR's own data make the case that the post is arguing — the regulator just declines to follow it to its conclusion.
Pip: A 244-page document that describes the disease in forensic detail and then recommends better handwashing. The next episode will have more to say about who gets to ask the harder questions.
The Independent Football Regulator’s State of the Game report presents itself as a sober, technocratic assessment of English football’s financial health. In reality, it is an extraordinary document: a 244-page anatomy of a social institution hollowed out by capitalist irrationality—and an unwitting indictment of the very economic system the regulator exists to stabilise. Its authors describe a “paradox” at the heart of the sport: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency. A Marxist analysis shows there is no paradox at all. What the IFR calls a puzzle is simply capitalism’s logic asserting itself with brutal clarity.
English football today is the clearest example of competitive accumulation. Clubs are compelled to spend beyond their means—not because they are reckless or poorly managed, but because the industry’s structure leaves them little choice. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Ninety-four per cent of clubs in the top five divisions lose money. This is not a departure from capitalist norms; it is their fulfilment. The IFR cannot acknowledge this, because doing so would mean admitting that the crisis is systemic, not accidental.
The report’s own data show how sport has been transformed into a financial asset class. Labour-power is converted into amortised capital, future transfer fees are sold off as fictitious capital, grounds and badges are pledged as collateral, and a handful of lenders extract value regardless of sporting outcomes. Football has become a site of financialisation, governed not by sporting logic but by the imperatives of debt, leverage and speculative investment. The IFR documents this process in forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications.
Ownership patterns point to the same reality: global capital, multi-club networks, and North American investment groups dominate the game. Returns are overwhelmingly negative, yet capital keeps flowing in—not for sporting reasons, but because football offers global reach, cultural legitimacy, and opportunities for speculation, soft power, and, as the report notes, money laundering.
The regulator’s role is not to challenge this system, but to preserve it. Its proposals amount to managerial tinkering that keeps the Premier League dominant and the pyramid intact, while leaving the underlying relations of ownership, finance, and exploitation untouched. Rather than resolve football’s contradictions, the IFR merely catalogues them, revealing the need for a fundamentally different model.
The so‑called paradox: wealth without stability
David Kogan’s foreword presents English football as both the world’s richest, most competitive league system and one on the verge of collapse. The figures are stark: clubs generated £9 billion in revenue last season, yet 94 per cent of those in the top five divisions lost money. No other major industry could report such figures without prompting immediate questions about systemic failure. Yet the IFR treats this as a managerial problem: poor governance, inadequate oversight, and clubs failing to “live within their means.” This is the ideological reflex of bourgeois regulation: to blame crises on individual actors’ behaviour rather than on the system’s structure.
A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise. When nearly every firm in an industry fails in the same way, the cause lies not in management but in the structure of accumulation. Marx explained long ago that competition forces capitalists to expand, invest and outspend their rivals to survive. The capitalist does not accumulate because he is greedy or irrational; the system compels him to. English football clearly illustrates this dynamic. Clubs spend beyond their means not because they are reckless, but because they have to. Falling behind in the competitive arms race risks relegation, lost broadcast income, collapsing commercial revenue and, ultimately, extinction.
The IFR’s own data confirm this. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Wage bills, transfer amortisation, agent fees, stadium financing, and debt servicing have all increased alongside revenue. The report presents this as a failure of “financial management,” as if clubs could spend less without jeopardising their competitive position. But in a system driven by accumulation, restraint is punished. A club that refuses to overspend isn’t prudent; it gets relegated.
This is why the IFR cannot acknowledge the crisis’s real nature. To do so would mean admitting that the contradictions it describes are not deviations from normal capitalist functioning, but its inevitable outcome. The regulator must therefore frame the crisis as a technical problem—liquidity, governance, and risk—rather than a structural one. It must pretend that stress tests, action plans, and “enhanced oversight” can correct football’s financial instability, rather than fundamentally transforming ownership, finance, and distribution.
The report’s language reflects this ideological constraint. Kogan describes a “paradox”: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency, as though the two were unrelated phenomena that mysteriously coexist. But there is no paradox: wealth and insolvency are two sides of the same process. The more revenue the game generates, the more capital flows in. The more capital flows in, the sharper the competitive pressures become. As those pressures intensify, clubs must spend more, and their losses deepen. The IFR describes the symptoms while refusing to name the disease.
The Political Economy of Football’s Financialisation
To understand the IFR’s findings, we should place English football within the broader political economy of late capitalism. Over the past three decades, it has undergone the same transformation as other major sectors of the global economy: a shift from production to financialisation, from profits generated through activity to profits extracted through ownership, leverage and speculation. Once a commercial entertainment industry, football has become a financial asset class, governed less by sporting logic than by the imperatives of capital accumulation.
This transformation did not happen overnight. Football’s first metamorphosis—from a working-class pastime to a commercial commodity—came in the early twentieth century. Its second, from commodity to global media product, gathered pace with television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when the collapse of productive investment across advanced capitalist economies pushed capital into new fields of speculation. With its global reach, predictable revenue streams and intense brand loyalty, football became an ideal arena for financial expansion.
Financialisation means that profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, it turns every aspect of the sport into a tradable asset. Player contracts are amortised like industrial machinery; future transfer fees are sold as receivables; and stadiums, training grounds and even club badges are used as collateral. Multi-club ownership groups operate like private equity portfolios, moving players, revenues and liabilities across borders to maximise returns. Debt is no longer a temporary burden but a permanent operating condition.
The IFR’s own data show the scale of this transformation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, and £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been monetised. Interest payments have quadrupled as borrowing costs have surged, while five lenders now control almost the entire transfer finance market. This is no marginal development; it is a structural reorganisation of the sport, driven by the dominance of finance capital.
Marx, Hilferding and Lenin all described how, once dominant, financial capital subordinates productive activity to its own logic. That logic now governs English football. Clubs borrow not to invest in long-term development, but to keep pace with the competitive arms race. They sell future transfer fees not out of prudence, but because the system compels them. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, reducing clubs to shells through which capital circulates.
Why football? Because it offers what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. It is one of the few sectors where losses can be tolerated for years because the club retains symbolic value as an asset. As the IFR notes, the sector is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures, and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.
The IFR documents this transformation with forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications. It describes the symptoms of financialisation, debt dependency, factoring, and multi‑club networks, but treats them as technical problems rather than structural ones. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalist functioning but its fulfilment. To do so would be to question the very model the regulator exists to preserve.
From commodity to media product to financial instrument
Football’s first transformation from a working-class pastime into a commercial commodity occurred in the early 20th century, as clubs evolved from voluntary associations into businesses selling gate receipts, advertising space, and professional players’ labour-power. Its second transformation from commodity to media product followed the rise of television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. Broadcasting turned football into a mass-produced cultural product, shaped by scheduling, advertising, and global distribution. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when football became a financial instrument.
This is not a metaphor; it is literal. Clubs borrow against future transfer fees. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery. Clubs pledge grounds and badges as collateral. Revenues are securitised. Multi-club groups operate like private equity portfolios. Every component of the sport- labour, infrastructure, intellectual property, and future income- is converted into an asset that can be traded, leveraged, or used as security. The IFR’s data show the scale of this transformation with forensic clarity: transfer factoring has risen fourteen-fold in four years, £1.2 billion of future receipts have already been sold, interest payments have quadrupled as the cost of debt has surged, and five lenders control almost the entire market for transfer finance. This is not a marginal development; it is the sport’s structural reorganisation under the dominance of finance capital.
What Hilferding described in *Finance Capital*- the fusion of banking and industrial capital into a financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes- is now evident on the balance sheets of English football clubs. Lenin’s analysis of how these oligarchies dominate entire sectors and turn them into instruments of speculation applies with almost uncanny precision. English football has become one of those sectors.
Financialisation means profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, this shows up in the conversion of every aspect of the sport into tradable assets: player contracts become depreciating capital goods, transfer fees become receivables, stadiums become collateral, clubs become vehicles for debt-fuelled expansion, and multi-club networks become platforms for arbitrage, talent extraction, and regulatory evasion.
The consequences are profound. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, while clubs become shells through which capital circulates. The IFR documents this fragility but cannot explain it, because doing so would require acknowledging that the instability is structural, not accidental.
Why football? Because it offers exactly what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. Few sectors can absorb years of losses while their core asset- the club- retains symbolic value. As the IFR itself notes, football is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs can become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.
Financialisation also helps explain why capital continues to flow into football despite negative returns. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, yet ownership is becoming more global, institutional and concentrated. This is not irrational; it reflects financial capital’s pursuit of control over assets it can leverage, securitise, or use to anchor broader commercial ecosystems. A Premier League club is more than a football team: it is a content engine, a data-harvesting platform, a global brand, a political instrument and a financial vehicle.
The IFR describes the symptoms of this transformation- debt dependency, factoring, and multi-club networks- but treats them as technical rather than structural problems. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its fulfilment. Doing so would mean questioning the very model the regulator exists to preserve.
Why football?
Football is uniquely suited to financialisation because it possesses characteristics that make it a coveted prize for capital. Few industries offer such a potent combination of global reach, emotional intensity, predictable revenue, scarcity and cultural legitimacy. These features are not incidental; they are precisely what make football attractive to finance capital in an era of stagnation, falling productive investment and the search for new fields of extraction.
Its global reach is unmatched. The Premier League reaches hundreds of millions of homes, giving capital access to a ready-made global consumer base. In a world of saturated traditional markets, football offers immediate access to audiences on every continent. Its emotional connection is even more valuable. Football clubs command a level of brand loyalty that no commercial product can replicate. Supporters do not switch allegiances based on price or quality. Their loyalty is inherited, irrational and lifelong. For capital, this is ideal: a captive market whose consumption is driven by identity rather than choice.
Football also offers predictable revenue streams. Broadcast rights, sponsorships, merchandise, digital content and hospitality packages bring in recurring income that can be securitised, borrowed against and bundled into financial products. Predictability is the lifeblood of financialisation. Then there is scarcity. Only a handful of elite clubs exist, and there is just one Premier League. Scarcity drives valuations, intensifies competition among investors and ensures that even failing clubs retain symbolic and financial value.
Finally, football enjoys cultural legitimacy. It presents itself as tradition, community, and heritage, masking the extraction taking place beneath the surface. This legitimacy gives political cover to private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and multinational corporations. In a low-growth economy, football offers something rare: an asset class with global visibility and political utility. It serves as a vehicle for surplus capital, a platform for soft power, and, as the IFR itself notes, a conduit for money laundering through offshore structures, opaque transfers, and sponsorship. Football’s financialisation is no accident. It is structural, and the IFR merely catalogues its symptoms.
Financialisation as crisis
Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it. The IFR’s own data reveal a sport whose financial architecture has been reshaped around debt, leverage and speculative instruments. Debt dependency, transfer factoring, leveraged ownership and sprawling multi-club networks do not build resilience; they create fragility. They tie clubs to financial obligations that become more burdensome precisely when sporting performance declines. Relegation clauses now embedded in most Premier League loans mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure when a club is at its weakest. A bad season becomes not just a sporting setback but a financial catastrophe. Clubs stop being community institutions and become shells through which capital circulates.
Factoring shows this dynamic with brutal clarity. When a club sells future transfer receipts to raise cash now, it mortgages tomorrow’s income to cope with today’s pressures. This is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: value that does not yet exist, monetised and traded as if it were already real. The IFR reports that factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, with £1.2 billion in future receipts already sold. This is not prudent financial management; it is a symptom of systemic desperation. Clubs are not planning for the future; they are consuming it.
Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners buy clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club, and extract returns through management fees, refinancing, and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting entities. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. The club becomes a financial vehicle first and a football team second.
The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It describes a sport that generates enormous wealth but cannot sustain itself, because financial channels siphon that wealth away before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental; it is structural. Football’s financial instability is not caused by mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable result of reorganising the sport around the imperatives of financial capital. The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. Doing so would mean acknowledging that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but an expression of it and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.
Labour as a cost, labour as an asset, labour as a battleground
The report’s treatment of labour is revealing. The report presents players almost exclusively as a cost, a liability to manage, rather than as the producers of the commodity behind the game’s enormous revenues. Wage bills have risen 33 per cent across the Premier League pyramid, 32 per cent in the Championship, 71 per cent in League One, and 63 per cent in League Two. Twenty clubs spend more than 80 per cent of their revenue on salaries. The regulator’s response is predictable: cost control, wage restraint, “responsible spending.” In other words, disciplining labour.
First, players are not simply workers; they are labour-power converted into financial assets. Modern football treats labour not just as a production cost but as a capitalised resource. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery: depreciated over time, securitised, borrowed against and used as collateral in complex financial arrangements. Agent fees, now £584 million, are part of this same machinery, serving as transaction costs in a financialised market for labour-power. The doubling of amortisation to £2.6 billion is no accounting quirk; it marks the conversion of labour into fictitious capital: value that exists only on balance sheets, yet is traded and leveraged as if it were real.
This transformation is central to football’s financialisation: labour-power becomes a financial instrument, with its value fluctuating according to market conditions, performance metrics, and speculative expectations. The IFR describes this process without understanding it, treating amortisation as a technical matter rather than as a structural reorganisation of labour under finance capital.
Second, wage restraint is class struggle. The PFA’s successful challenge to salary caps in 2020, and its current High Court action, are not “governance friction.” They are organised workers resisting an attempt to fix their share of the surplus. The IFR cannot admit this because it would require acknowledging that labour has interests irreconcilable with capital. The regulator’s framework assumes harmony among stakeholders, owners, leagues, players, and fans, and treats conflict as a managerial problem. But wage restraint is not a governance issue. It is a matter of class power.
The report’s language exposes this ideological blind spot. It describes wage inflation as a “risk,” a “pressure,” and a “threat to sustainability.” Nowhere does the IFR consider that rising wages reflect labour’s bargaining strength in a sector where workers create enormous value. The regulator’s job is to protect clubs’ financial stability, not workers’ living standards or bargaining power. As a result, it frames wage growth as a pathology rather than as a sign of labour asserting itself.
Third, the category “player wages” masks profound stratification. A Premier League star earning £300,000 a week has little in common with a League Two professional on a precarious one-year deal. Yet the IFR treats “player wages” as a single category, obscuring class divisions across the labour force. The report focuses on elite wage inflation while overlooking the conditions most football workers face: academy staff, cleaners, stewards, groundskeepers, analysts, youth coaches, and hospitality workers. The analysis renders these workers invisible. The IFR’s framework counts their labour only where it intersects with financial risk.
This invisibility is ideological. It reflects the regulator’s assumption that players perform the “real” labour of football, and that the “real” costs are those that affect balance sheets. The thousands of workers who make football possible maintaining stadiums, training youth players, cleaning facilities, managing logistics, providing security, and running matchday operations are treated as background noise. Their exploitation goes unanalysed because it is not financialised.
The most devastating statistic is the one the IFR buries: seventeen EFL and National League clubs would lose money even if they paid their players nothing. That fact alone undermines the report’s central claim that wage inflation is the root problem. If clubs cannot break even without paying a single player, wages are not driving insolvency; the business model is. Ownership structure, reliance on debt, value extraction through financial channels, volatile revenue streams, and the competitive arms race drive the crisis.
But the IFR cannot say so. To do so would mean admitting that labour is not the problem; capital is. It would mean acknowledging that the financialisation of football has created a system that blames workers for a crisis caused by owners, lenders, and speculative investors. It would also mean recognising that wage restraint is not a solution but an attack on labour. The report thus treats labour as a cost to be controlled rather than a source of value. It documents the symptoms of exploitation but refuses to name the exploiters. It catalogues the contradictions in football’s labour market while defending the system that creates them. In doing so, it reveals regulation’s limits under capitalism: labour can be disciplined, but capital cannot be challenged.
Finance capital takes control.
The report’s most explosive revelations concern finance capital’s penetration into every pore of the sport. What the IFR documents, often without grasping its significance, is English football’s near-total subordination to the logic of financialisation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in just four years. £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been sold- income that does not yet exist, monetised and spent before a single pound has been earned. Interest payments have surged from £97 million to £455 million as the cost of debt has tripled. Five lenders control 93.6 per cent of transfer finance, with one lender alone controlling nearly half. This is not a competitive market. It is an oligopoly.
None of this is accidental. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising football according to the imperatives of finance capital. Hilferding, writing more than a century ago, described how banking and industrial capital fuse into a single financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes. Lenin showed how such oligarchies dominate entire sectors, turning them into instruments of speculation. English football is now one of those sectors. The IFR’s data could have been lifted directly from Finance Capital or Imperialism.
Factoring future fees is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: money raised today against value that does not yet exist. Clubs sell tomorrow’s transfer income to survive today’s pressures, mortgaging their future to remain competitive in the present. This is not prudent financial management. It is systemic desperation. The club consumes its future to survive its present.
The collateralisation of heritage assets is equally revealing. Grounds, badges, and training facilities, the physical and symbolic infrastructure of the people’s game, are increasingly pledged as security for loans. The IFR notes that 60 per cent of Premier League clubs have relegation‑triggered repayment clauses. This means sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure. A bad season is no longer merely a sporting setback; it is a financial catastrophe. The club’s identity, history and community assets become bargaining chips in negotiations with lenders.
Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners acquire clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club itself, and extract returns through refinancing, management fees and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting institutions. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. Clubs become shells through which capital circulates.
The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It shows a sport that generates enormous wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon that wealth off before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental. It is structural. Football’s financial instability is not the result of mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising the sport according to the imperatives of financial capital.
The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. To do so would be to acknowledge that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its expression and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.
Ownership without roots, capital without loyalty
The IFR’s ownership data show a sport transformed into a global asset class. English football is no longer a national game but a marketplace for international capital. Non‑domestic owners now control 75 per cent of Premier League revenue. North American capital controls nearly half of the entire pyramid. Eighty‑five per cent of Premier League clubs belong to multi‑club or multi‑sport groups, integrated into sprawling corporate networks that treat football teams as interchangeable units within a global portfolio. This is not cosmopolitan modernisation. It is the sport’s financial colonisation.
The most striking fact is that returns are overwhelmingly negative. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, with only 21 of 76 making a positive return. Yet capital continues to flow in. The report cannot explain this. It treats negative returns as a puzzle, as though investors were behaving irrationally. But a Marxist analysis can. Capital does not enter football to earn conventional profits. It enters because football offers value extraction, political leverage, and speculative opportunity unavailable in the productive sectors of a low‑growth economy.
Football offers speculative opportunities. Promotion windfalls can transform a club’s valuation overnight. Leveraged buyouts let owners acquire clubs with borrowed money and load the debt onto the club. Asset stripping selling stadium land, training facilities, or intellectual property can generate returns even when the club loses money. The IFR notes that distressed clubs are particularly vulnerable: their financial weakness makes them easy targets for acquisition, refinancing and exploitation. The “community club” becomes a conduit through which capital passes, its heritage assets collateralised, its future income securitised, its identity commodified.
Football also offers soft power. Sovereign wealth funds, oligarchs, and politically connected investors use clubs to project influence, launder reputations, and embed themselves in Western cultural institutions. Ownership becomes a diplomatic tool. The club becomes a platform for geopolitical branding. The IFR acknowledges this obliquely, noting concerns about “suitability” and “integrity,” but it cannot confront the political reality: English football has become a theatre for state power.
Then there is the laundering of surplus capital. In a low‑growth economy, productive investment yields diminishing returns. Capital seeks outlets to move, disguise, or recycle money through complex financial structures. Football provides precisely this. As the IFR itself notes, the sport is exposed to money laundering through offshore ownership, opaque sponsorship deals, and transfer arrangements routed through tax havens. Transfers often involve multiple intermediaries, shell companies, and inflated valuations, providing ideal mechanisms for moving capital across borders. Sponsorship deals from offshore entities allow funds to enter clubs with minimal scrutiny. Distressed clubs, desperate for liquidity, are the easiest entry points.
Multi‑club ownership networks intensify these dynamics. They let capital move players, revenues, and liabilities across borders, exploiting regulatory differences and arbitrage opportunities. Clubs become nodes in a global financial ecosystem, with their sporting identity secondary to their role in the network. The IFR describes this trend but cannot analyse it. It treats multi‑club ownership as a governance challenge rather than a structural expression of financial imperialism.
The regulator’s data reveal a sport whose ownership model is not merely globalised but financialised. Clubs are not owned to win matches. They are owned to extract value, launder capital, project influence and anchor wider commercial ecosystems. The IFR catalogues these realities but cannot name them. To do so would be to admit that English football is no longer a sport governed by sporting logic but an asset class governed by the imperatives of global capital.
The regulator as the ideal collective capitalist
Engels described the capitalist state as the “ideal collective capitalist”: an institution that manages the bourgeoisie’s common affairs, sometimes against individual capitalists, to preserve the system as a whole. The IFR fits this description precisely. Its first goal is to protect the hierarchy. The report’s distribution aims begin with preserving the Premier League as the world’s leading league and the Championship as the leading second tier. Inequality is to be eased, not ended. The top club earns 605 times the revenue of the smallest National League club.
The industry welcomes the regulator. The Premier League endorsed the report and claims its own proposals already meet the IFR’s objectives. A regulator embraced by the dominant firms is not a regulator that threatens them. Its tools are mild: action plans, stress tests, risk assessments. No hard liquidity floors until 2028–2030. No limits on transfer‑finance exposure. No challenge to debt dependency, multi‑club ownership or the private model itself. Fans receive a voice, not power. Clubs must “consider” supporters’ views. The model allows no mutual ownership, 50+1, or public stakes. Supporters remain consultees, not owners. Even Kogan’s stated fear that the supply of owners and media money may dry up reveals the limits of the IFR’s worldview. The worry is that capital might stop flowing in. No one ever asks whether capital should run the game at all.
The IFR has produced the most detailed evidence yet of how English football has been transformed into a financial asset class. Its data, often presented with bureaucratic neutrality, amount to a devastating indictment of the system the regulator exists to preserve. But its prescriptions aim only to make the commodity sustainable, not to liberate the sport from the market. The IFR’s task is not to challenge capital’s domination of football but to ensure that domination continues in a more orderly, less visibly chaotic form.
A Marxist programme begins where the report ends. To reclaim football as a social institution rather than a financial instrument, we must dismantle the foundations of the current model. That means pooling broadcast income across the entire pyramid to end the grotesque inequality that makes competitive overspending inevitable. It means capping debt and banning factoring so clubs can’t mortgage their future to survive the present. It means supporter and worker ownership on a 50+1 basis or stronger, ensuring that those who produce and sustain the game control it. It also means public or community ownership of grounds, removing heritage assets from finance capital’s collateral chains. Finally, it means recognising all club workers—not only players—as producers of the game, with rights, protections, and democratic power.
These measures are not utopian. They are the minimum required to reverse the financialisation documented in the IFR’s own report. They would transform football from an asset class back into a public good. They would replace extraction with stewardship, speculation with solidarity, and debt dependency with democratic control. The regulator can manage symptoms. It cannot cure the disease. It can stabilise insolvency, not prevent it. It can discipline labour, not restrain capital. It can protect heritage assets as collateral, not as community property. It can preserve the hierarchy, not democratise it.
The IFR’s State of the Game is therefore more than a report. It is a mirror held up to a decaying system. It shows a sport that generates extraordinary wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon it off. It shows a regulator tasked with preserving a model that produces crisis. And it shows, unintentionally, that the only real alternative lies outside market logic. Football must be reclaimed as a social institution, not a financial instrument. Only then can the contradictions the IFR describes be resolved, not through technocratic oversight, but through democratic control, collective ownership and the abolition of football’s subordination to capital.
Bibliography
Marxist Theory and Political Economy
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin Classics, 1991.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Classics, 1993.
Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975.
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. London: Routledge, 1981.
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge, 2003.
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lapavitsas, Costas. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. London: Verso, 2013.
Chesnais, François. Finance Capital Today. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Football Governance, Economics and Financialisation
Szymanski, Stefan. Money and Football: A Soccernomics Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Szymanski, Stefan & Kuypers, Tim. Winners and Losers: The Business Strategy of Football. London: Viking, 1999.
Kuper, Simon & Szymanski, Stefan. Soccernomics. London: HarperCollins, 2022.
Müller, Jan. “Multi‑Club Ownership and the Financialisation of Football.” Journal of Sport Economics 24(3), 2023.
Serby, Tom. “Regulating Football: The Limits of Governance Reform.” International Sports Law Journal, 2022.
Conn, David. The Fall of the House of FIFA. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2017.
Chadwick, Simon & Widdop, Paul (eds.). The Geopolitical Economy of Sport. London: Routledge, 2023.
Reports, Regulatory Documents and Industry Data
Independent Football Regulator (IFR). State of the Game: Draft Report, 2026.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Football Governance White Paper, 2023.
Premier League. Annual Report and Financial Statements, various years.
English Football League (EFL). Financial Sustainability Review, 2024.
UEFA. European Club Footballing Landscape Report, 2023–2026.
FIFA. Global Transfer Market Report, 2025.
Investigative Journalism and Contemporary Coverage
Conn, David. “English Football’s Debt Crisis Exposed.” The Guardian, 2024.
Ingle, Sean. “How Finance Capital Took Over Football.” The Guardian, 2025.
The announcement that Arsenal Football Club intends to axe up to 60 jobs just months after winning its first league title in 22 years and posting record revenues is a devastating exposure of the class logic governing modern football. It reveals, with clinical clarity, billionaire ownership’s priorities and the ruthless mechanisms through which capital restructures every sphere of social life, including the world’s most popular sport.
On October 14, chief executive Richard Garlick informed staff that dozens of commercial, administrative and operational workers would be made redundant. The coaching staff, first‑team performance departments, academy, Arsenal Foundation, security teams and the women’s football set‑up were exempt. Instead, the axe falls on the ordinary workers who keep the club functioning: ticketing staff, retail workers, office administrators, and back‑office personnel. These are not high‑earning executives or elite athletes. They are workers on modest wages in one of the world’s most expensive cities, facing a cost‑of‑living crisis that has already pushed millions to the brink.
The timing of the announcement is no coincidence. It clearly reflects the priorities of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE ), the American conglomerate that owns Arsenal. The club has just completed one of the most successful seasons in its modern history, recording record revenues of £691 million for 2024/25 and an overall loss of just £1.4 million, effectively breaking even. A week before the redundancies were announced, manager Mikel Arteta signed a new contract reportedly worth £20 million a year, making him the Premier League’s highest-paid coach. Over the summer, Arsenal spent £150 million on Christos Tzolis, Bruno Guimarães and Ezri Konsa.
The club’s wage bill for the year to May 2025 was £346.8 million. Even if all 60 workers earned £50,000—a generous assumption—the total saving would be around £3 million: less than one per cent of the wage bill and a fraction of a single star player’s annual salary. The cuts are not financially necessary; they are a political and class decision.
The Consultants’ Axe: Manufactured Inevitability
The redundancies did not emerge organically from the club’s internal operations. Arsenal hired management consultants from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to review operations and identify “efficiencies.” BCG is a global firm whose interventions in corporations and governments routinely end in job losses. Its presence is a warning sign in any workplace. It provides owners with a veneer of technocratic legitimacy: the cuts are not the owners’ decision; they are the result of an “audit,” a “review,” a “recommendation.”
This is a familiar tactic. In 2020, during the pandemic, Arsenal made 55 staff redundant, including Jerry Quy, the long-serving employee who played the club mascot Gunnersaurus, even after first-team players took a 12.5 per cent pay cut on the understanding that staff jobs would be protected. The pandemic is long over, revenues have soared, and the club is richer than ever. Yet the same owners are wielding the same axe.
The statutory “consultation” process now under way is a legal formality. It gives management a procedural framework to implement decisions already made. It does not give workers a veto. It does not provide democratic control. It manages dissent and absorbs anger.
Football Under Capital: A System of Extraction
Arsenal is not an isolated case. Under Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United has cut hundreds of jobs in successive rounds of restructuring. Workers were told the club was facing ruin, even as vast sums continued to flow into transfers and stadium plans. Across the Premier League, revenues from broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals and ticket prices, which increasingly price working-class fans out of the grounds, continue to climb. Yet the workers who sell the shirts, staff the offices, maintain the stadiums and keep the clubs functioning are treated as expendable.
A draft “State of the Game” report from the new Independent Football Regulator found that 94 per cent of clubs in England’s top five divisions lost money last season, despite combined revenues of around £9 billion. Clubs spend this money on transfer fees, star salaries and debt servicing. Rising player-asset values enrich owners, while ordinary staff bear the risk. “Losses” on paper sit alongside billion-pound valuations. The regulator, established by the British state, does not challenge this arrangement. Its purpose is to stabilise it.
Football is now fully integrated into the global financial system. Clubs are treated as assets whose value is measured not by their social role or community significance, but by their ability to generate revenue streams, attract global sponsorships, and appreciate. Billionaire owners do not view clubs as institutions rooted in working‑class communities. They view them as vehicles for capital accumulation.
The Class Logic of Arsenal’s Cuts
Arsenal’s operating costs have risen sharply from £148 million to £201 million, and wages continue to climb. The club has posted losses for seven consecutive years, despite record revenues. Ownership is using this to justify restructuring. But the cuts target only the lowest‑paid workers, not the structural drivers of cost.
The logic is simple: invest heavily in the asset (the squad), cut ruthlessly from the labour that does not directly generate market value. The workers being made redundant do not increase the club’s valuation. They do not attract global sponsorships. They do not produce highlight reels or social media engagement. They are therefore expendable.
This is the logic of capital in every industry. It is the logic that has driven mass layoffs across technology firms, media companies, logistics giants and public services. It has produced record profits for corporations and record hardship for workers. Football is not immune. It is a microcosm of capitalism’s broader crisis.
The Anger of Supporters and Its Limits
Many supporters reacted with anger. On fan sites, many pointed out that a single top player earns in a week what several of the threatened workers earn in a year. Others asked whether the consultants’ fees cost more than the jobs being cut. The anger is justified. But it cannot be channelled into appeals to the “Arsenal family” or to the goodwill of billionaires.
KSE’s purpose is not to run a community institution. Its purpose is to increase the value of a global sports asset alongside the Kroenke family’s other franchises. It is not accountable to supporters. It is not accountable to workers. It is accountable only to capital.
What Is Needed: Independent Organisation and Democratic Control
The 60 Arsenal workers should not have to fight this alone or rely on a consultation process controlled by management. They need their own independent rank-and-file committee: a democratic body, free from management and trade union bureaucracy, and able to organise collective resistance. The committee should demand: No job cuts. Full pay for all workers. Publication of the BCG report, consultant contracts and ownership finances. Solidarity from matchday staff, stewards, supporters and workers at other clubs facing similar cuts.
Players, staff, and millions of working people who pay for tickets, subscriptions, and merchandise produce football’s wealth through their labour. As long as billionaires own the sport and run it for profit, every record revenue figure will be followed by another round of “efficiencies” for those at the bottom.
Defending these jobs is part of a broader struggle: to take football and the economy out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and put them under democratic control. Arsenal’s redundancies are not an isolated event. They are a symptom of a system that prioritises profit over people, valuation over community, and capital over labour.
Pip: When a book about seventeenth-century witch trials starts feeling uncomfortably relevant, that is either a triumph of scholarship or a very bad sign about the present — possibly both.
Mara: This episode covers freerein61's long review of Marion Gibson's Witchland, working through what the book gets right about the victims of the 1640s witch-hunt and where its explanatory framework falls short. Let's start with the history Gibson recovers — and the history the review argues she misreads.
The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class, Crisis, and the Limits of Witchland
Pip: The central tension here is between two things that can both be true: a book can restore dignity to people history erased and still fail to explain why they died. That is the argument the review makes about Gibson's Witchland — admirable reconstruction, inadequate framework.
Mara: The review opens by crediting Gibson's archival work seriously. She brings back into view the hundreds of people "wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history," reconstructing their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts from fragmentary parish registers and court documents.
Pip: So the recovery project is real. The problem is the explanation layered on top of it — specifically the American subtitle's framing of a "deadly moral panic," which the review treats as sociologically vague and historically evasive.
Mara: Right. The review argues that "moral panic" treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality without deeper cause, and crucially places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane — two hysterical factions in a culture war — rather than parties to a class struggle with a definite historical direction.
Pip: Which is where the argument gets genuinely interesting, because the review is not just complaining about framing. It is making a structural claim: the conditions that produced Matthew Hopkins were produced by the revolution itself.
Mara: Exactly. The collapse of the assize circuits, local Puritan elites freed from central oversight, freelance witch-finders operating with near impunity — these are consequences of a state apparatus fractured by civil war. The review puts it plainly: "the witch-hunt was a distorted expression of the revolution itself."
Pip: And the victims were not random. Overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal, economically dependent — gender shaped their vulnerability, the review says, but class determined it.
Mara: Gibson's microhistorical case studies actually support this. Her portraits of impoverished, often elderly or widowed women show how enclosure, inflation, and the erosion of customary relief turned the poor into objects of resentment. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.
Pip: The review also points outward — to the Levellers, the Diggers, Winstanley's attack on private land itself — as the plebeian wing of the same revolution. The witch-hunt and the most radical democratic currents of the age were happening simultaneously.
Mara: And the review draws a direct line to the present: ruling classes confronting economic crisis manufacture internal enemies. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers, cruelty legitimated in the name of public safety — are, the review argues, recognisable today.
Pip: Though the lesson offered is not simply "fear is dangerous." It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order finds no progressive resolution and the oppressed lack an independent political voice.
Mara: Gibson's book, the review concludes, restores its subjects' humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis connecting their fate to the revolutionary transformation Gibson's framework stops short of.
Pip: What stays with me is the double verdict — Gibson succeeds at restitution and falls short on explanation — and the implication that those two things require different tools entirely.
Mara: The review suggests the tools are still needed. Same mechanisms, different targets, same underlying dynamic. Worth sitting with.
Marion Gibson’s Witchland is a humane, meticulously researched, and often moving account of the largest witch-hunt in English history. At its heart is a powerful act of historical restitution: bringing back into view the hundreds of people “wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history” who were hunted down in the 1640s, when Britain was convulsed by civil war, economic breakdown, and the collapse of traditional authority. Gibson’s work to recover their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts is both real and substantial. With admirable patience and care, she restores the lives of people who appear in the archive, if at all, as little more than entries in a witch-finder’s tally, drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records.
Yet Gibson’s conceptual framework for situating this material does not adequately account for the historical forces at work. The witch-hunt cannot be explained by “moral panic,” free-floating misogyny, or a generalised climate of fear. These categories separate the witch-hunt from the revolutionary crisis in which it unfolded and reduce the political landscape to a timeless tableau of communal anxiety. The 1640s were not merely years of heightened emotion; they were the decisive decade of the English Revolution, a confrontation between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war shattered the machinery of justice, disrupted the assize circuits, empowered local Puritan elites, and created conditions in which freelance interrogators such as Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne could operate with near impunity. Their methods of “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, and template-driven interrogations produced confessions that reflected the interrogators’ own demonological assumptions rather than the accused’s lived experience.
The witch-hunt was no inexplicable eruption of mass hysteria. It was a distorted expression of the English Revolution itself: a class struggle refracted through Puritan providentialism and intensified by the collapse of the old social order. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. To understand why gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-1640s, we must look beyond village frictions to the deeper transformation underway: peasant dispossession, the erosion of customary relief, and a ruling class divided against itself.
The Strength of Gibson’s Reconstruction
Gibson’s method is microhistorical. Each chapter centres on a particular place — Manningtree, Chelmsford, the Suffolk villages, or the Scottish Lowlands — and rests on painstaking archival research. Drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records, often “incomplete or barely legible,” she reconstructs the lives of the accused. Her portraits of impoverished women, often elderly, widowed, or reliant on neighbours’ charity, give substance to the well-established thesis of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane: witchcraft accusations arose from the breakdown of traditional obligations of neighbourly charity. As enclosure, inflation, and the land market eroded the old village economy, poor people who still came to the doors of the better-off became objects of resentment and fear. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.
Gibson’s case studies show how war sharpened these frictions. The 1640s brought requisitioning, free quarter for soldiers, plundering, disrupted trade, harvest failure, and plague. The machinery of justice broke down. “Less qualified men sat in judgment.” Assize circuits collapsed. Local authorities, pressed by fearful parishioners, hired freelance witch-finders like Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Their methods — “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, interrogations shaped by template questions — produced confessions that mirrored the interrogators’ own demonological fantasies. Gibson identifies these template questions as a key reason why so many confessions sound alike.
She also incorporates the Scottish dimension, showing how trials under the Covenanting regime in the early 1640s were ideologically—and sometimes personally—connected to the English hunts. The 1604 Witchcraft Act, passed under James VI and I, provided the legal basis for prosecution. Together, these developments formed a transnational witch-hunting movement, shaped by shared religious and political anxieties. Gibson’s reconstruction is humane and conscientious, restoring dignity to people history tried to erase. But the question her book raises—and only partly answers—is a historical one: why did the largest witch-hunt in English history erupt in the midst of the English Revolution?
The Limits of “Moral Panic”
The American subtitle of Witchland invokes “a deadly moral panic,” and the publisher’s descriptions speak of polarisation, fanaticism and “a country ripped apart by fear.” This language is not entirely misplaced, but it is fundamentally insufficient. The term “moral panic” is a sociological category developed in the 1970s. It describes a pattern of exaggerated public alarm, but it offers little historical explanation. It treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality, a kind of cultural fever that swept across communities without deeper cause. It reduces the violence of the 1640s to a psychological pattern rather than a historically specific social crisis. Most importantly, it places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane, as two equally hysterical factions locked in a culture war, and it detaches the witch-hunt from the revolutionary transformation of English society that made such persecution possible.
The English Revolution was not a culture war but a historically progressive struggle that destroyed absolutism, executed a king, and opened the way for capitalism to develop in Britain. The conflict between Crown and Parliament reflected a deeper class struggle: an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order opposed a rising commercial gentry, merchants, and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war was fought not only over constitutional forms but also over the future of English society—the survival of feudal structures and the emergence of capitalist ones. This revolutionary confrontation created the conditions for witch-hunting to flourish.
The witch-hunt was not an inexplicable eruption of fear. It was the product of a definite social crisis, of a breakdown in the old structures of authority and of a state apparatus temporarily in the hands of local Puritan elites who saw in the war a struggle against the forces of the Antichrist. The collapse of the assize circuits, the absence of central oversight and the ideological fervour of Puritan magistrates created a vacuum. The witch hunters’ methods of enforced sleeplessness, “watching and walking,” and interrogations shaped by template questions produced confessions that reflected their own demonological assumptions rather than the lived experience of the accused. The machinery of justice had been fractured by war, and in that fractured space the most vulnerable members of society became targets of state-sanctioned violence.
The witch-hunt must therefore be understood as a distorted expression of the revolution itself. It arose from the collapse of the old social order, mounting class tensions and the ideological weapons of a rising bourgeoisie waging its struggle in the religious guise of Puritanism. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. Most of those accused were women living on the edge of subsistence, dependent on neighbours’ charity and exposed to the resentments and anxieties fueled by enclosure, inflation and the collapse of customary relief. The men accused were likewise poor and dependent. The trials reveal not a timeless misogyny, but the vulnerability of those shut out of property and political power.
To understand why the gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-seventeenth century, one must attend not only to village frictions but to the deeper social transformation under way. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of communal obligations, the fragmentation of state authority and the ideological fervour of a rising class all converged in the 1640s. The witch-hunt was not a cultural fever. It was a symptom of revolution.
The revolution was led by a bourgeoisie and gentry who fought in the religious garb of Puritanism. Their worldview fused a genuine hostility to arbitrary power with intense providentialism — a belief that God and the Devil intervened directly in human affairs. In the hands of local elites suddenly freed from royal and episcopal oversight, they could turn that ideology against the most defenceless. This is the key to understanding the witch-hunt. The victims were overwhelmingly poor. They were socially marginal, economically dependent, and politically powerless. Misogyny played a role, but it was not the root cause. The victims were not simply women; they were poor women, and the men accused were poor. The contemporary academic tendency to treat gender as a self-standing cause obscures what the trials actually show: the vulnerability of those excluded from property and dependent on others’ goodwill. The witch-hunt was a weapon of class power, wielded by local elites in a moment of revolutionary upheaval.
The same revolution that produced the witch-hunt also produced the age’s most advanced political currents. The Levellers demanded manhood suffrage and equality before the law. The Diggers, around Gerrard Winstanley, attacked private land ownership itself. Radical sectarians questioned the existence of a personal Devil. These movements represented the plebeian wing of the revolution — the embryonic political voice of those who would later form the working class.
As the revolution consolidated under the Commonwealth and the propertied classes reasserted control, the witch-hunt subsided. The Restoration of 1660 brought no revival on the same scale, and by 1736 the Witchcraft Act had been repealed. The witch-hunt was not a timeless expression of misogyny or fear. It was a product of a specific revolutionary conjuncture, and it disappeared when that conjuncture passed.
Lessons for Today
Gibson makes it clear that she wrote her book with the present in mind. She warns of a resurgence of political and religious hatreds, misogyny, nationalism, and persecution. She argues that remembering the victims of past injustice helps us recognise and resist such trends. Several reviewers have taken up the same theme.
The warning is justified. Across the world, ruling classes confronted by deepening economic crisis, war, and social inequality are turning to scapegoats: immigrants and refugees, Muslims, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. Governments and media manufacture internal enemies to divert mounting social anger away from those responsible. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of the outsider, official encouragement of informers, the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety — are recognisable.
But the lesson of the 1640s is not merely that “fear” and “polarisation” are dangerous, or that individuals should refuse to be swept along. Persecution of the vulnerable flourishes when the crisis of an old social order finds no progressive resolution, and when the oppressed are left without an independent political voice of their own. In the seventeenth century, Cromwell’s Grandees crushed the plebeian radicals who could have offered such a voice. Today, resisting the modern witch-hunt requires conscious, international political mobilisation of the working class against the social system that breeds it.
Witchland is a humane, carefully researched, and readable book that restores dignity to people history tried to erase. Marion Gibson succeeds in bringing back into view individuals who have survived in the record only as names in indictments or as victims in the ledgers of witch-finders. She reconstructs their lives with sympathy and care, and she shows how accusations grew out of the frictions of everyday existence in a world strained by war, dearth and the collapse of traditional obligations. Her work gives substance to the rural poor of the 1640s, people who lived precariously on the margins of subsistence and whose vulnerability made them targets of suspicion when the social fabric began to tear. For this achievement, the book deserves a wide readership.
Yet Gibson’s conceptual framework cannot capture the historical meaning of the witch-hunt. The language of moral panic, fear and fanaticism is not entirely misplaced, but it is too limited to account for the scale and timing of the events she describes. The witch-hunt did not erupt in a vacuum. It unfolded amid the English Revolution, when old structures of authority were breaking down, and new ones had not yet taken stable form. The war between Crown and Parliament expressed a deeper conflict between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests demanded the destruction of royal prerogative. This struggle fractured the machinery of justice. Local Puritan elites, freed from central oversight, exercised powers they had never possessed before
The witch-hunt was therefore not simply a psychological phenomenon. It was a distorted expression of revolutionary crisis. The victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. The trials reveal the anxieties of a society in transition, in which the old communal bonds were dissolving, and the emerging capitalist order had not yet established new forms of security. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of customary relief and the intensification of economic pressures created conditions in which the most defenceless members of society could be accused of consorting with the Devil. The witch-hunt was one way a ruling class divided against itself projected its fears onto those who had no means of resistance.
This history is not confined to the seventeenth century. Gibson is right to warn of contemporary scapegoating, of the persecution of immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. The mechanisms she documents, including suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers and the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety, are recognisable today. But the lesson of the 1640s is not only that fear is dangerous. It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order confronts crisis without progressive resolution and when the oppressed lack an independent political voice. In the seventeenth century, the plebeian radicals who might have provided such a voice were suppressed. Today, resisting new forms of witch-hunting requires the conscious mobilisation of the working class against the social system that produces them.
Witchland restores its subjects’ humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis that connects their fate to the revolutionary transformation of English society.
Bibliography
Books
Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain. London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2026.
Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. New York: Scribner, 2026.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge, 1970.
Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Hill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs’Our Islands’ Story, published by Swift Press, is not a work of history but a political intervention presented in the language of scholarship. Its title deliberately echoes H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905), the Edwardian children’s book that taught generations of British schoolchildren a sanitised story of kings, battles and imperial destiny. David Cameron named it his favourite childhood book. Biggar and Tombs now offer an adult version for a society in crisis, as the ruling class seeks to rehabilitate empire as part of a broader ideological mobilisation for war.
The publisher’s own description makes its purpose clear. The book is presented as a corrective to what it calls “fashionable” accounts of Britain’s past, which focus on its crimes while overlooking its achievements. One endorsement praises it for highlighting “the good things that Britain and her Empire have done.” This is not scholarship with political implications; it is political propaganda presented as scholarship.
Both authors come to the subject with long-established agendas. In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), Biggar weighed the British Empire’s moral record, balancing railways, legal codes, and the suppression of the slave trade against Amritsar, the Bengal famine, and the detention camps in Kenya. Tombs, author of The English and Their History, founded History Reclaimed to oppose what it calls “woke distortions” of Britain’s past. He was also a prominent academic advocate for Brexit. Our Islands’ Story brings these projects together in a single, readable volume for the general public.
The balance‑sheet method: petty‑bourgeois moralism as ideology
The balance-sheet method is the book’s organising principle. It presents empire as a series of discrete policies- some good, some bad- to be judged by an impartial moralist. In doing so, it obscures what defines empire: a system of exploitation driven by British capital’s need for markets, raw materials and investment opportunities. The Irish Famine, the opium wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, Amritsar and the partition of India were not lapses in an otherwise benevolent project. They were logical outcomes of a profit-driven system. Treating these events as isolated “mistakes” falsifies their meaning. They were not deviations from the norm, but expressions of it: the violence required to maintain a global hierarchy of labour, property and political domination.
The balance‑sheet approach is not simply inadequate; it is ideological. It rests on the fiction that empire can be morally audited, its crimes offset by its “achievements.” This is the language of accountancy applied to human suffering. It presupposes that the historian stands outside history, weighing actions on a timeless moral scale. But no such figure exists. The “impartial moralist” is not a neutral observer. It is a class position: the petty‑bourgeois intellectual who claims to stand above classes while in reality serving the ruling class by laundering its crimes into moral verdicts. The balance sheet is the ideological form of this pretence: a way of transforming structural exploitation into a series of moral transactions.
Trotsky demolished this posture in Their Morals and Ours, exposing the appeal to eternal moral truths as a device that invariably justifies the interests of the powerful. He insisted that morality is historically conditioned. The ruling class invokes “universal” principles only to sanctify its own domination. Biggar’s method is a textbook example. His earlier Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning framed empire as a moral puzzle: how to weigh railways against famines, legal codes against massacres. But this is not moral reasoning; it is apologetics. It treats the products of exploitation as moral credits and the consequences of exploitation as moral debits, thereby preserving the system itself from scrutiny.
Biggar’s theological background is not incidental. The balance sheet is a secularised theodicy: sins weighed against graces to vindicate the whole. Theodicy seeks to reconcile evil’s existence with God’s goodness. Biggar’s project is to reconcile imperial violence with the supposed beneficence of British civilisation. The structure is identical. The moral ledger becomes a way to explain away atrocities rather than explain them. The question is never why empire produced famine, massacre and dispossession, but how these can be integrated into a narrative of ultimate righteousness.
This method also serves a crucial ideological function today. By dissolving empire into moral fragments, it obscures the class relations that produced it. Empire was not the collective achievement of “the nation.” It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion. The British working class had no more control over the decisions that produced the Irish Famine or the Bengal famine than the colonised populations who suffered them. To weigh empire’s “benefits” and “costs” as if they were shared nationally erases this fundamental division.
The balance‑sheet method therefore serves two purposes. It sanitises the past by transforming systemic violence into isolated moral lapses. And it prepares the present by offering a usable past for a ruling class once again turning to militarism and great‑power conflict. A population taught to see empire as “on balance” a force for good is more easily mobilised for new imperialist ventures. The moral accountant becomes the state’s ideological quartermaster.
The ideological work of “our”
The title’s possessive, Our Islands’ Story, performs essential ideological labour. It asserts a common national inheritance where none existed. The rhetorical move is simple but decisive: by placing the empire within the category of “our” history, Biggar and Tombs dissolve the class divisions that structured both the making of empire and its consequences. The British working class were not shareholders in empire; they were its domestic raw material, the source of the surplus value that financed imperial expansion. Their labour underwrote the industrial and financial power that enabled Britain’s global reach, yet they remained politically disenfranchised, economically exploited and socially subordinated. They had no more say in the decisions that produced famine in Bengal or massacres in Kenya than the peasants and workers who suffered them.
The ideological function of the possessive is therefore to universalise what was in reality a class project. Empire was not the achievement of a unified national community. It was the instrument of a ruling class whose interests lay in global expansion, the suppression of colonial resistance and the extraction of profit from subject peoples. To speak of “our” empire is to erase the fundamental division between those who benefited from imperial plunder and those who paid for it in Britain through exploitation and poverty, and across the colonies through dispossession, famine and repression.
This erasure is central to the book’s political purpose. By claiming empire as a shared inheritance, Biggar and Tombs seek to bind the working class to the ruling class’s ideological needs in the present. The appeal to national unity always precedes reaction. In periods of crisis, the ruling class turns to the myth of a common past to justify the demands it will soon impose: sacrifices for “national security,” acceptance of militarisation, and support for foreign policy adventures dressed up as moral obligations. The possessive in the title is therefore not a stylistic flourish but a strategic device. It lays the ideological groundwork for the argument that Britain’s imperial past is a source of pride, continuity, and collective identity.
But the “inheritance” Biggar and Tombs defend belongs only to those who profited from empire. The working class’s real inheritance is the history of struggle against exploitation at home and abroad: the Levellers, the Chartists, the 1926 General Strike, the solidarity of Lancashire cotton workers with the anti‑slavery cause. To reclaim that history is to reject the false unity of “our” islands and to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in reconciling with empire but in abolishing the system that produced it.
Slavery, abolition and the falsification of history
Although the book must be quoted directly once you have the text, its treatment of slavery and abolition is predictable. The standard apologetic line that Britain’s suppression of the slave trade redeems its earlier participation is a moral fable. It rests on the assumption that abolition was a spontaneous flowering of British civilisation, a moment when the nation’s conscience awoke and corrected its earlier sins. This is mythology. Enlightened rulers did not bestow abolition on enslaved people. It was the product of a specific historical conjuncture: the rise of industrial capitalism, which made slave‑based plantation production increasingly incompatible with British economic interests, combined with mass pressure from below, the working-class abolitionist movement, Caribbean slave revolts, and the political agitation of the oppressed themselves.
By the early nineteenth century, the economic foundations of empire were shifting. Industrial capitalism required wage labour, expanding markets, and new forms of investment. Plantation slavery, with its rigid labour system and limited consumer base, increasingly obstructed these needs. The ruling class did not abolish the slave trade out of moral revulsion but because British capitalism’s economic logic was changing. At the same time, enslaved people were not passive recipients of emancipation. Revolts in Jamaica, Barbados and Demerara shook the foundations of colonial rule. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slavery could not be maintained without permanent military occupation and escalating violence. In Britain, working-class abolitionists, including Lancashire cotton workers who later supported the Union during the American Civil War, pressured the ruling class in ways it could not ignore.
Even after abolition, British capital continued to profit from slave‑produced cotton and colonial labour. Lancashire mills were fed by cotton harvested by enslaved workers in the American South. British banks financed slave economies across the Atlantic. Colonial labour systems indenture, forced cultivation, punitive taxation reproduced the essential features of slavery under new names. The balance‑sheet method hides this continuity. By treating abolition as a moral credit that cancels earlier crimes, Biggar and Tombs obscure the fact that exploitation did not end in 1807 or 1833; it merely changed form.
The apologetic narrative of abolition serves the same ideological purpose as the rest of the book: to present empire as a moral project, flawed but ultimately benevolent, rather than as a system of global exploitation whose violence was structural, continuous and indispensable.
India, Ireland and the logic of imperial violence
The same method distorts India’s history. The Bengal famine of 1943 was not a natural disaster but the result of wartime requisitioning, price manipulation, and the diversion of grain by a colonial administration that prioritised imperial military needs. The famine directly expressed imperial policy under crisis: grain was exported from Bengal even as millions starved; Churchill’s War Cabinet rejected pleas for relief shipments because it needed shipping elsewhere; and colonial officials insisted the market must be allowed to “regulate” supply. The result was the death of three million people. To treat this as a tragic lapse, an unfortunate misjudgment in an otherwise benevolent imperial record, is to falsify its meaning. It was the predictable consequence of a system whose overriding priority was prosecuting Britain’s global war effort and protecting imperial interests, not the lives of colonial subjects.
Amritsar, likewise, was not an aberration but the normal operation of colonial rule under conditions of political resistance. The massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in 1919 was not the product of a rogue officer or a momentary breakdown in discipline. It was the logical extension of a regime built on coercion, surveillance and the suppression of dissent. The colonial state responded to mass political mobilisation with exemplary violence, designed to terrorise the population and reassert imperial authority. To isolate Amritsar as a “mistake” is to deny the structural character of colonial repression.
Ireland exposes the lie most starkly. The Great Famine was not a tragic misfortune but a social catastrophe produced by the enforcement of market discipline under colonial rule. British administrators refused to suspend grain exports, insisted that relief must not interfere with the “natural” operation of the market, and treated mass starvation as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of economic orthodoxy. The ideology of laissez‑faire was applied with lethal rigidity to a colonised population whose land, labour and political rights had already been stripped away. Any attempt to minimise or moralise the Famine as an unavoidable tragedy or a failure of compassion is the book’s most damning evidence of its ideological purpose. It reveals the balance‑sheet method for what it is: a device that dissolves structural violence into isolated moral episodes, preserving the legitimacy of the imperial system itself.
The treatment of India and Ireland thus exposes the core function of Biggar and Tombs’ project: to rehabilitate empire by severing its crimes from their economic and political foundations, transforming systemic exploitation into a series of unfortunate events that can be weighed, excused and ultimately forgiven.
Militarism and the ideological mobilisation for war
The timing of Our Islands’ Story is not accidental. The book arrives as governments across Europe pour money into rearmament and ideologically prepare their populations for war. In Britain, this mobilisation is inseparable from the ruling class’s role as NATO’s most aggressive European participant in the war against Russia, its surge in defence spending, and the media’s demand for an “end to the post‑Cold War peace dividend.” The political establishment speaks openly of a “pre‑war world,” of the need to rebuild munitions stockpiles, expand the arms industry, and prepare society for prolonged conflict. In such a climate, rehabilitating empire is not an academic exercise but an ideological necessity. A ruling class that seeks to wage new imperialist wars must first sanitise the old ones.
Militarism requires a usable past. A population taught to feel shame about colonial massacres is harder to mobilise than one taught that Britain has been, “on balance,” a force for good. The authors’ complaint about a “demoralising” view of history reveals more than it admits. Their concern is not historical accuracy but national morale. They object not to falsehoods but to truths that undermine the ideological cohesion required for war. The balance‑sheet method, with its moral credits and debits, functions as a psychological preparation: it reassures the public that Britain’s global interventions have historically been justified, even noble, and therefore that future interventions may be as well.
The book’s celebrity endorsements fit this pattern. John Grey, the philosopher of liberal disillusionment, praises it as essential reading. Its defence of empire as a remedy for “partisan narratives” speaks volumes about the state of official intellectual life. The liberal intelligentsia, having abandoned any serious critique of capitalism, now embraces a nostalgic nationalism that aligns seamlessly with the geopolitical aims of the ruling class. The ideological convergence between conservative imperial apologetics and liberal pessimism is not accidental. Both currents seek to stabilise a crisis-ridden social order by appealing to a mythologised past.
None of this means that the left‑liberal accounts Biggar and Tombs attack are the alternative. Much of what passes for “decolonising” history in universities substitutes moral denunciation and racial categories for class analysis. It leaves the profit system which produced both empire and its present‑day successors off the hook. The liberal critique of empire often frames itself as a struggle over national identity: whether Britain should feel pride or guilt. This is the mirror image of the right‑wing narrative, which insists on pride and rejects guilt. Both approaches treat history as a moral drama rather than as the unfolding of class relations and economic imperatives.
This symmetry is not new. As Nick Beams demonstrated in his analysis of Australia’s “History Wars,” both the revisionist right and its liberal critics treat history as a question of national identity rather than class struggle. The same pattern repeats here: both sides moralise, and neither offers class analysis. The right defends empire as a civilising mission; the liberal academy condemns it as a racial injustice. But both frameworks obscure the underlying reality: empire was a product of capitalism, driven by the need for markets, raw materials and strategic dominance. Its violence expressed class interests, not national character, whether noble or wicked. To frame empire as either national pride or national shame is to accept the nationalist premise that “the nation” acted as a unified subject. In reality, the British working class had no more control over imperial policy than the colonised populations who suffered its consequences.
The real history of these islands is not the story Biggar and Tombs tell. It includes the Levellers and the Chartists, the Irish national struggle, the 1926 General Strike, and Lancashire cotton workers’ solidarity with the anti‑slavery cause in the American Civil War. It includes the mass movements against imperialist war, the struggles of miners, dockers and engineers, and the internationalist traditions of the British working class. These movements were not marginal footnotes to the national story; they were the decisive expressions of the only social force capable of opposing imperialism: the working class. Their history shows that workers’ interests in Britain never aligned with the ruling class’s interests at home or abroad. The working class fought for democratic rights, social equality and international solidarity, while the ruling class pursued profit, domination and war.
This history points not to reconciliation with Britain’s imperial past but to the international struggle for socialism. The working class’s inheritance is not the empire but the fight against it: the strikes, mutinies, protests, and political movements that challenged capital’s power and its global system of exploitation. Reclaiming that history means rejecting the ideological project embodied in Our Islands’ Story. It is to recognise that the only genuine community of interest is the international working class, whose future lies not in rehabilitating empire but in abolishing the capitalist system that produced it.
Our Islands’ Story is an ideological artefact of a ruling class preparing for war and seeking to rehabilitate its imperial past. Its method is moralistic, its history selective, its politics reactionary. Against this stands the working-class history, the only force capable of opposing imperialism and preventing the catastrophe toward which capitalism is driving humanity. The task today, as in every period of crisis, is to arm the working class with historical truth, not the sanitised myths of bourgeois historians. Only on that basis can a movement oppose war, defend democratic rights, and fight for a socialist future.
Bibliography
Marxist Theory and Method
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vols. I–III.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.
Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution.
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital.
Nick Beams, “The ‘History Wars’ and the Politics of the Past,” World Socialist Web Site, 2000–2001.
World Socialist Web Site Analysis
Tom Scripps, “British Imperialism and the Drive to War,” WSWS May Day Report, 2023.
Jean Shaoul, “Emergency Exits: Britain’s Counterinsurgency Wars and the Logic of Empire,” World Socialist Web Site, 2024.
Chris Marsden and Thomas Scripps, “NATO’s War Against Russia and the Militarisation of Europe,” WSWS, 2023–2024.
David North, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century.
David North, A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016.
British Empire: Structure, Violence, and Political Economy
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.
Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.
Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.
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Utsa Patnaik, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays.
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.
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J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study.
Ireland and Colonial Political Economy
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Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52.
Peter Grey, Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–50.
India, Famine, and Colonial Rule
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Slavery, Abolition, and Capitalism
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Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery.
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Contemporary Ideology, Culture Wars, and Historical Revisionism
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David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (for contrast with liberal racial framing).
Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (primary source for critique).
Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (primary source for critique).
The withdrawal of Sally Rooney’s novels from circulation in the United Kingdom marks a decisive and unprecedented moment in the country’s political life. For the first time in modern British history, anti-terror legislation has made a major contemporary novelist’s entire body of work effectively inaccessible to readers. This is neither a symbolic gesture nor a dispute between a publisher and an author. It is a concrete expression of a new political reality: Britain is becoming a state where political dissent, artistic expression, and even the circulation of fiction are subordinated to the demands of national security and imperialist war.
Two lines capture the essence of this shift with stark clarity:
“Faber has announced that it will no longer distribute Sally Rooney’s books in the UK, as a result of legislation that prevents it from giving the author earnings from UK sales of her work.”
“A novelist’s royalties, a publisher’s contracts and the circulation of works of fiction are now subject to the terror laws.”
These sentences are not rhetorical flourishes; they describe a legal reality created by the Labour government’s proscription of Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000. Rooney’s stated intention to donate royalties to the group—a non-violent direct-action organisation that targets arms manufacturers supplying Israel’s war in Gaza—now puts her publisher at risk of prosecution. The result is censorship unprecedented in scope and significance, exposing the authoritarian logic behind British state policy.
The July 2025 proscription of Palestine Action was itself a watershed. For the first time, a direct-action movement targeting property rather than people was designated a terrorist organisation. The government cited damage to two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, an action that caused no casualties. Yet the group was placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass-casualty bombings. This redefinition of “terrorism” was no technical adjustment; it was a political manoeuvre—a deliberate expansion of the state’s coercive powers to include forms of protest that threaten the interests of the military-industrial complex.
The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Belonging to or expressing support for Palestine Action became a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers were dragged off by police for holding cardboard signs. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where more than 2,000 cases related to supporting the group were due to be heard. Even sections of the judiciary baulked. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold to justify a ban. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, with five judges declaring the ban “justified and proportionate” and asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the executive. In four months, the judiciary moved from scepticism to full deference, signalling the consolidation of a legal doctrine designed to insulate the security state from democratic scrutiny.
The Rooney affair must be understood in this context. Her novels have not been withdrawn because of their content or an editorial dispute. They have been withdrawn because the state has criminalised the author’s political convictions. Rooney’s intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action—a movement opposing British complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza—as an act of solidarity now makes fulfilling her publishing contracts potentially illegal. Faber’s decision to halt distribution is therefore not an act of commercial prudence but of political compliance. The publisher’s statement that selling an author’s work while being unable to pay her is “an unconscionable situation” obscures a deeper truth: the state has claimed the right to regulate cultural production through anti-terror legislation, and the cultural establishment has accepted that claim without resistance.
This acceptance is itself politically revealing. Where are the joint statements from the major publishing houses, the Society of Authors, PEN, and the literary prize committees calling for the ban to be repealed? Their silence is no oversight; it reflects their integration into the state’s ideological apparatus. The cultural establishment will not defend democratic rights because it is structurally incapable of doing so. Its function is to reproduce the ideological conditions of capitalist rule, not challenge them.
The withdrawal of Rooney’s novels thus points to a broader transformation. Britain is entering a period in which the ruling class, faced with capitalism’s deepening crisis and preparing for wider war, is dismantling democratic rights won through generations of struggle. The criminalisation of Palestine Action, mass arrests of peaceful protesters, judicial deference to executive power, and now the censorship of a major novelist all reflect the same process: a shift toward authoritarian rule. This introduction sets the stage for examining that process in its historical, political, and class dimensions. The Rooney case is no anomaly. It is a warning of what is being prepared—and of what must be opposed.
The Legal Mechanism: Terrorism Law as Cultural Regulation
The Labour government justified the proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 based on a single incident: an act of direct action in which activists damaged two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. The action caused no casualties, involved no threat to life, and was explicitly aimed at disrupting Britain’s logistical support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Yet this incident was seized upon to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation — the first time in British history that a direct‑action movement targeting property rather than people has been placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass‑casualty violence. This unprecedented step marked a qualitative escalation in the British state’s assault on democratic rights.
The significance of this reclassification cannot be overstated. It deliberately expands the definition of “terrorism” to include forms of political protest that challenge the interests of the military‑industrial complex. In effect, the state has asserted that damage to military property — even when carried out as part of a non‑violent anti‑war protest — is equivalent to acts of indiscriminate violence against civilians. This is not a neutral legal interpretation but a political manoeuvre designed to criminalise dissent and insulate the machinery of war from public opposition.
The consequences have been sweeping and immediate. Support for Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 2,000 cases are pending, many involving individuals arrested for holding cardboard signs or expressing solidarity on social media. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where hearings related to the proscription were taking place. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers have been dragged off by police for acts that, until recently, would have been protected under the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. The scale of repression is unprecedented in modern Britain, and it reveals the extent to which the state is prepared to deploy anti‑terror legislation against its own population.
The impact on Sally Rooney underscores the breadth of this authoritarian turn. Rooney herself has been advised she could face arrest upon entering the UK, forcing her to accept awards by proxy. Her declared intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action — an act of political solidarity — now renders the fulfilment of her publishing contracts potentially illegal. The withdrawal of her novels from circulation is therefore not an isolated cultural event but a direct consequence of the proscription’s sweeping scope. It shows that the terror laws are not confined to policing protest but extend into artistic expression, cultural production, and the circulation of literature.
The judiciary’s role in legitimising this transformation is central. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold required to justify a ban. This ruling briefly suggested that judicial oversight might check executive overreach. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, with five judges declaring the ban “justified and proportionate.” Their ruling went far beyond a simple reversal. It established a doctrine of extreme judicial deference to the executive, asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the Home Secretary.
This doctrine represents a profound shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the executive the authority to criminalise political movements based on speculative assessments of potential future actions. The judiciary, rather than scrutinising the government’s claims, has accepted them as matters of specialist expertise beyond judicial competence. In doing so, it has constructed a legal architecture suited to authoritarian governance — one in which the executive’s assertions about national security are treated as unchallengeable.
The implications of this shift are far‑reaching. The Court of Appeal’s ruling does not merely uphold the proscription of Palestine Action; it lays the groundwork for future bans on political organisations, protest movements, and cultural institutions deemed threatening to the state’s strategic interests. It signals that the judiciary will not act as a barrier to expanding executive power but will instead facilitate it. This is the legal foundation for the withdrawal of Rooney’s novels. The state has asserted the right to regulate cultural production through anti‑terror legislation, and the courts have affirmed that right.
The proscription of Palestine Action must therefore be understood as part of a broader transformation of the British state. It is not an isolated response to a specific protest action but a strategic move within a wider project: the restructuring of the legal and political order to suppress dissent, protect the interests of the military‑industrial complex, and prepare for the social conflicts that will accompany Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist war. The criminalisation of Palestine Action, the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, and the censorship of a major novelist are all expressions of this project.
The construction of an authoritarian legal order is now well advanced. The question is not whether the state will continue to expand its powers but how far it will go — and how the working class will respond.
The Rooney Case: Cultural Production Under State Supervision
Rooney’s decision to donate royalties to Palestine Action was an act of political solidarity. Under the new legal regime, it became a criminal liability. Faber’s withdrawal of her books is therefore not a commercial decision but a political one — an act of compliance with the state’s demand that cultural production be subordinated to counter‑insurgency logic.
The publisher’s statement that selling an author’s work while being unable to pay her is “an unconscionable situation” is revealing. It frames the withdrawal as a matter of contractual ethics rather than political coercion. But the choice to comply rather than resist is itself political. The cultural establishment — publishers, prize committees, PEN, the Society of Authors — has responded with near‑total silence. This is not an oversight. These institutions are structurally integrated into the state’s ideological apparatus and cannot be relied on to defend democratic rights.
Rooney’s refusal to recant is admirable, but the article correctly notes that personal moral courage cannot halt the authoritarian turn. The issue is systemic, not individual.
Labour’s Role: The Party of State Security
The Labour government justified the proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025 based on a single incident: an act of direct action in which activists damaged two Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton. The action caused no casualties, involved no threat to life, and was explicitly aimed at disrupting Britain’s logistical support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Yet this incident was seized upon to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation — the first time in British history that a direct‑action movement targeting property rather than people has been placed in the same legal category as organisations responsible for mass‑casualty violence. This unprecedented step marked a qualitative escalation in the British state’s assault on democratic rights.
The significance of this reclassification cannot be overstated. It deliberately expands the definition of “terrorism” to include forms of political protest that challenge the interests of the military‑industrial complex. In effect, the state has asserted that damage to military property — even when carried out as part of a non‑violent anti‑war protest — is equivalent to acts of indiscriminate violence against civilians. This is not a neutral legal interpretation but a political manoeuvre designed to criminalise dissent and insulate the machinery of war from public opposition.
The consequences were immediate and sweeping. Support for Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years in prison. More than 2,000 cases are pending, many involving individuals arrested for holding cardboard signs or expressing solidarity on social media. On July 30, police arrested 117 people outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where hearings related to the proscription were taking place. Pensioners, clergy, students, and workers have been dragged off by police for acts that, until recently, would have been protected under the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. The scale of repression is unprecedented in modern Britain and reveals the extent to which the state is prepared to deploy anti‑terror legislation against its own population.
The impact on Sally Rooney underscores the breadth of this authoritarian turn. Rooney has been advised she could face arrest upon entering the UK, forcing her to accept awards by proxy. Her declared intention to donate royalties to Palestine Action — an act of political solidarity — now renders the fulfilment of her publishing contracts potentially illegal. The withdrawal of her novels from circulation is therefore not an isolated cultural event but a direct consequence of the proscription’s sweeping scope. It shows that the terror laws are not confined to policing protest but extend into artistic expression, cultural production, and the circulation of literature.
The judiciary’s role in legitimising this transformation is central. In February 2026, the High Court ruled the proscription unlawful, finding that Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the threshold required to justify a ban. But the government did not retreat. In June, the Court of Appeal overturned the decision, declaring the ban “justified and proportionate” and asserting that assessments of “future risk” were “pre‑eminently” matters for the Home Secretary. This doctrine of extreme judicial deference represents a profound shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the executive the authority to criminalise political movements based on speculative assessments of potential future actions.
The implications are far‑reaching. The Court of Appeal’s ruling lays the groundwork for future bans on political organisations, protest movements, and cultural institutions deemed threatening to the state’s strategic interests. It signals that the judiciary will not act as a barrier to expanding executive power but will instead facilitate it. The proscription of Palestine Action must therefore be understood as part of a broader transformation of the British state: the construction of a legal order designed to suppress dissent, protect the interests of the military‑industrial complex, and prepare for the social conflicts accompanying Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist war.
A Warning and a Turning Point
The withdrawal of Sally Rooney’s novels is not a cultural controversy. It is a politically significant event. It demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that the British state is prepared to regulate artistic expression through anti‑terror legislation, criminalise political solidarity, and subordinate cultural production to the logic of imperialist war. This is not the accidental by‑product of an overzealous bureaucracy, nor the misapplication of a statute designed for other purposes. It is the conscious deployment of the terror laws as an instrument of political control, aimed at suppressing dissent and disciplining cultural life in accordance with the strategic needs of the ruling class.
The Rooney case reveals the true scope of the authoritarian turn. Counter-terrorism policy has placed a novelist’s royalties, a publisher’s contracts, and the circulation of fiction under its jurisdiction. The state has asserted that an author’s political convictions — expressed not through violence but through the donation of earnings — constitute grounds for restricting access to her work. This profoundly ruptures the liberal‑democratic norms that Britain’s political establishment claims to uphold. It signals that the boundaries of permissible expression will henceforth be determined not by public debate or artistic autonomy but by the government’s security priorities.
This development must be understood within the broader context of Britain’s deepening involvement in imperialist conflict. The proscription of Palestine Action, the mass arrests of peaceful protesters, and the judicial doctrine of deference to executive power are all components of a single process: the restructuring of the state to prepare for war abroad and repression at home. As Britain supplies arms components for the F‑35 programme, flies surveillance missions over Gaza, and aligns itself ever more tightly with Washington’s geopolitical agenda, it simultaneously expands the domestic machinery required to silence opposition to these policies. The censorship of Rooney’s novels is not an aberration; it is the cultural expression of this militarised political order.
The cultural establishment’s muted response confirms the depth of the crisis. Publishers, prize committees, PEN, and the Society of Authors have issued no collective defence of artistic freedom. Their silence is not simply cowardice but reflects their structural position within the state’s ideological apparatus. These institutions are not designed to resist authoritarianism; they are designed to accommodate it. Their function is to reproduce the cultural legitimacy of the existing order, not to challenge its foundations. When confronted with the terror laws, they comply.
The judiciary has likewise demonstrated its willingness to facilitate the authoritarian turn. The Court of Appeal’s ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is “justified and proportionate,” and that assessments of “future risk” are matters for the executive, represents a decisive shift in the constitutional balance of power. It effectively grants the Home Secretary the authority to criminalise political movements on speculative claims. This doctrine is not a temporary aberration but a durable legal architecture suited to the needs of a state preparing for intensified social conflict.
It warns of what is being prepared. The censorship of Rooney’s novels is a harbinger of future measures aimed at suppressing political opposition, regulating cultural production, and criminalising solidarity with movements that challenge Britain’s imperialist role. The question now is whether the working class will build the political force capable of resisting this offensive — or whether the authoritarian transformation of Britain will proceed unchecked.
The courts, the cultural establishment, and the parliamentary parties cannot be entrusted with the defence of democratic rights. It requires the independent mobilisation of the working class, armed with a socialist programme that opposes war, rejects the authoritarian state, and challenges the capitalist system that produces both. Without such a movement, the repression now directed at Palestine Action and Sally Rooney will expand, deepen, and harden into a permanent feature of British political life.
Bibliography & Relevant Articles
Primary Reporting
Publishers Weekly: Coverage of Faber’s withdrawal and legal implications.
Times & Star: Reporting on Rooney’s statements regarding criminal liability.
New Arab: Analysis of the proscription’s impact on protest movements.
Leinster Express: Details on the High Court and Court of Appeal rulings.
Huck Magazine: Documentation of mass arrests and police repression.
Express & Star: Commentary on cultural institutions’ muted response.
AP News: Background on Palestine Action’s designation and political context.
Secondary Analysis
World Socialist Web Site (WSWS):
“Britain’s High Court says government acted illegally in outlawing protest group Palestine Action.”
“Labour’s authoritarian turn and the criminalisation of dissent.”
“The political significance of the Rooney case.”
Theoretical & Historical Works
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy.
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This emerges from one of the defining atrocities of the twenty-first century: the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. On October 25, 2023, three weeks into the bombardment, El Akkad published a brief social-media post predicting that, once accountability became impossible and dissent cost nothing, “everyone will claim to have always opposed the slaughter.” Viewed more than ten million times, the post captured a truth millions instinctively recognised: having justified and facilitated the mass killing, the political and media establishment would one day try to rewrite its own record. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, the book that grew from that sentence has resonated deeply with those horrified by Gaza’s destruction and repelled by the complicity of governments, universities, cultural institutions, and the press.
That response is itself politically significant. It expresses the profound alienation of broad sections of the population, especially young people, from the political establishment that has funded, armed, and defended the annihilation of an entire population. The disgust is real, deep, and justified. It reflects not only revulsion at images of children pulled from rubble, hospitals bombed, and entire neighbourhoods levelled, but also the recognition that institutions claiming to embody democratic values have revealed themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. Millions have watched the Trump administration, the European Union, and every major imperialist power provide diplomatic cover, military hardware, and political legitimacy to a campaign of extermination. Millions have watched the media parrot lies, suppress evidence, and smear protesters as antisemites. Millions have watched university administrators summon riot police against students demanding an end to genocide.
El Akkad’s book gives voice to this disgust. It catalogues the moral cowardice of editors who refused to use the word “genocide,” cultural figures who stayed silent to protect their careers, and a liberal intelligentsia that retreated into evasions and platitudes. Written in anger, the book’s anger is entirely justified. But disgust, however sincere, is not a political programme. Here, El Akkad’s book reveals the limitations of an entire social layer: the liberal intelligentsia, shaken by the abyss but unable to explain how it arrived there or how humanity can escape it. The book is framed as a “breakup letter with the West,” a lament for betrayed values. But the genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of Western values; it expresses the real interests of the ruling classes of the United States and Europe. Imperialism did not lose its soul in Gaza. It revealed its essence.
El Akkad’s category of “the West” is therefore politically useless. It treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic system rooted in the domination of finance capital and the struggle for global hegemony. It conflates rulers and ruled, obscuring the decisive fact that the same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on the living standards and democratic rights of workers at home. The millions who marched in London, New York and Berlin; the dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments; the students beaten by police- these too are “the West.” The question is not whether the West has lied, but which class rules it, and which class can end that rule.
El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the political perspective required to overcome it. The task is not to mourn the collapse of liberal illusions, but to arm the working class with a scientific understanding of imperialism and the revolutionary programme needed to end it.
The book’s strengths: A searing portrait of moral cowardice
El Akkad, born in Egypt, raised partly in Qatar and educated in Canada, spent years as a journalist covering Guantánamo, the war in Afghanistan and the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. These experiences form the emotional and political substratum of his book. He writes not as a detached observer but as someone who has repeatedly witnessed the machinery of state violence and the moral evasions that accompany it. His anger toward the media, cultural institutions and the liberal intelligentsia is genuine and sharply expressed. He catalogues the editors who refused to use the word “genocide,” the university administrators who summoned riot police against peaceful encampments, and the literary figures who remained silent to protect their careers. As he puts it, these were the people who “would not use the word ‘genocide,’ the university administrators who sent riot police against encampments, the literary figures who stayed silent to protect their careers.”
His contempt for the bien-pensant press’s “both sides” evasions is entirely justified. The media’s role in laundering the genocide through euphemisms, distortions, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian voices was not an incidental failure but a structural function. The press acted as an ideological arm of the state, manufacturing consent for mass murder while presenting itself as a neutral arbiter. El Akkad’s indictment of this cowardice is one of the book’s strongest elements. As a description of the moral rot of official society, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This has undeniable force. But a description is not an explanation. And moral revulsion is not a strategy.
This is the book’s decisive limitation, and the social layer it represents. El Akkad’s outrage targets individuals and institutions that failed to live up to their professed values. But the failure is not personal; it is systemic. The media did not avoid the word “genocide” because of individual cowardice alone. They avoided it because acknowledging genocide would implicate the entire political and economic order of American imperialism. University administrators did not call riot police because they were personally timid; they did so because universities function as corporate entities integrated into the state apparatus. Literary figures did not remain silent merely out of fear for their reputations; they remained silent because the cultural establishment is structurally dependent on the same class interests that prosecute imperialist war.
El Akkad’s book captures the symptoms but not the disease. It records the moral collapse of liberal institutions but does not explain why that collapse was inevitable. The abyss shakes the liberal intelligentsia, but it cannot comprehend the historical and class forces that produced it. Its response is emotional rather than analytical, moral rather than political. It recoils from barbarism but cannot identify the social force that could end it.
The tragedy of Gaza cannot be understood through the lens of personal betrayal or institutional hypocrisy. It must be understood as the outcome of an imperialist global system driven by the interests of finance capital and enforced through military violence. To oppose genocide requires more than disgust; it requires a scientific understanding of this system and a strategy rooted in the independent mobilisation of the international working class.
The central flaw: “The West” as a moral category
El Akkad’s central analytic category is “the West,” understood as a set of professed values- freedom, human rights, the rule of law- now exposed as hypocrisy. This framework is profoundly inadequate. It treats imperialism as a moral failure rather than a socio‑economic system rooted in definite class interests. It assumes the ruling classes of the United States and Europe have betrayed their own ideals, when in fact those ideals have always served as ideological cover for pursuing global hegemony.
The genocide in Gaza is not a betrayal of the “values” of American and European capitalism. It expresses the ruling classes’ real interests in those countries. For more than a century, imperialist policy in the Middle East has been determined by the drive to control the region’s resources, strategic routes and geopolitical chokepoints. From the Sykes–Picot Agreement to the CIA‑engineered coup against Mossadegh, from the arming of the Shah to the invasion of Iraq, the imperialist powers have treated the region as a battleground for the assertion of their economic and strategic dominance. Israel functions as the spearhead of US imperialism in the region, a heavily militarised outpost whose role is to enforce American interests through overwhelming violence.
The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the slaughter continued and escalated under Trump; it was not a moral lapse. It was policy. It flowed from the strategic calculations of the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies, which view Israel as indispensable to maintaining US control over the Middle East. The bombs dropped on Gaza were not the result of moral confusion or political cowardice; they were the logical outcome of imperialist strategy.
To speak of “the West” as a single moral community obscures the decisive question: class. It collapses rulers and ruled into a single category, erasing the fundamental antagonism between the capitalist class that directs imperialist policy and the working class that suffers its consequences. The same governments that bomb Gaza are waging war on the jobs, wages and democratic rights of workers at home. They slash social programmes, attack trade unions, criminalise protest and funnel billions into the military‑industrial complex. The working class is not the beneficiary of imperialism; it is one of its victims.
The dockworkers who refused to load arms shipments, the students beaten by police, and the millions who marched in London, New York and Berlin are also “the West.” Their actions demonstrate that opposition to genocide is not geographically or culturally determined but socially determined. It arises not from “Western values” but from the objective interests of the working class, which has no stake in imperialist domination and every reason to oppose it.
The question is not whether the West has lied, but which class rules it, and which class can end that rule. The ruling class lies because its interests require it. It speaks of human rights while arming dictatorships, of democracy while supporting coups, of peace while preparing for war. These contradictions are not accidental; they are inherent in a system based on exploitation, competition and the global struggle for markets and resources.
El Akkad’s category of “the West” therefore functions as a political diversion. It directs attention away from the capitalist class and toward an amorphous cultural entity. It encourages despair over analysis, moral lamentation over political struggle. It suggests that the problem is hypocrisy rather than imperialism, values rather than class power.
Liberal disillusionment: Expecting better from those who never offered it
The emotional centre of El Akkad’s book is disappointment with liberalism, particularly the Democratic Party milieu in which much of the American literary world lives. He writes as a man who believed the West offered justice and discovered that much of what it promises is a lie. This sense of betrayal permeates the text. It is the disillusionment of someone who expected moral courage from institutions that have never demonstrated it. The shock is genuine, but it also reveals the political naïveté of a social layer that mistook liberal rhetoric for liberal reality.
Yet the book never draws the necessary political conclusion: the Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military‑intelligence apparatus. It is not a vehicle for reform, and appeals to its conscience are politically bankrupt. The same party that postures as defender of human rights has overseen drone assassinations, mass surveillance, wars of aggression and the arming of Israel to the teeth. Its role in Gaza is not an aberration but the continuation of a decades‑long imperialist trajectory. To imagine that such a party can be pressured into moral action is to misunderstand its class character entirely.
Instead, El Akkad retreats into the language of individual moral choice- refusal, bearing witness, what one person can do as a citizen and father. These impulses are not ignoble. They reflect a sincere desire to resist barbarism. But they are politically impotent. Individual refusal does not stop bombs. Bearing witness does not halt the machinery of imperialist war. The moral courage of isolated individuals, however admirable, cannot substitute for a collective, organised, class‑based struggle against the system that produces genocide.
The book is permeated by helplessness, the direct product of its failure to identify any social force capable of transforming society. El Akkad sees the abyss but cannot locate the agency capable of overcoming it. His narrative is moral collapse without political resolution, outrage without strategy, and despair without direction. This is not a personal failing but the liberal intelligentsia’s characteristic limitation: it recoils from the consequences of imperialism yet remains ideologically tethered to the very institutions that enforce it.
The tragedy of Gaza demands more than sorrow or revulsion. It demands a scientific understanding of imperialism and the recognition that only the international working class mobilised independently of all capitalist parties possesses the power to end the system responsible for such crimes.
The politics of moral witness: A dead end
This impasse mirrors the pseudo-left’s broader crisis. In a March 2024 lecture at the University of Michigan, David North addressed Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation and journalist Chris Hedges’s celebration of it, who hailed the act as “a potent political message.” North’s answer applies equally to El Akkad’s politics of moral witness. He insisted that the turn toward individual acts of desperation reflects not political clarity but political exhaustion. As North explained:
“The fundamental driving force of social revolution is not inchoate and desperate rage but an understanding of the objective contradictions of the world capitalist system and the mass social action that is guided by the comprehension of these contradictions.”
This is the essential point. Rage, grief, moral shock- these are powerful emotions, but they do not constitute a strategy. They do not identify the social forces that can halt imperialist barbarism. They do not explain the historical and economic processes that produce genocide. And they do not provide a path for the working class to intervene as an independent political force.
The problem confronting the movement against the genocide, North insisted, “has not been public indifference but the absence of a political perspective and strategy.” Millions have marched, occupied campuses, blocked ports, and defied police repression. The obstacle is not apathy but the political framework that has confined these actions. As North noted, the protests “have remained within the confines of the existing structures of bourgeois politics… directed not toward the independent political mobilisation of the working class against capitalist rule but to the application of pressure on bourgeois governments.”
This is precisely the dead end El Akkad’s book expresses. His narrative is one of moral collapse without political resolution. He documents institutional cowardice but cannot explain why those institutions behaved as they did. He condemns hypocrisy but does not identify the class interests that make hypocrisy inevitable. He recoils from genocide but cannot conceive of a social force capable of stopping it. The result is a politics of witness, not a politics of struggle.
El Akkad’s book is therefore a literary expression of the broader impasse of the pseudo‑left: a movement that responds to imperialist barbarism with moral anguish rather than scientific analysis, with individual gestures rather than collective strategy, with despair rather than revolutionary perspective. It is a politics that sees the abyss but cannot see beyond it.
Identity politics: A reactionary diversion
The promotional framing around El Akkad’s book speaks of a “deep fracture” for Black, brown and Indigenous Americans and for younger generations who had kept faith in Western ideals. This racial and generational framing- the stock-in-trade of identity politics- divides the working class precisely where unity is required. It interprets political disillusionment not as a universal response to imperialist barbarism but as the particular trauma of specific demographic groups. In doing so, it transforms what is fundamentally a class question into a mosaic of racial and generational grievances.
The opposition to the Gaza genocide has cut across every racial, ethnic and national line. Millions of workers and youth of every background have marched in London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Johannesburg, Sydney and São Paulo. Dockworkers of diverse origins refused to load shipments of arms. Students from every demographic category faced police repression. Healthcare workers, teachers, postal workers, artists and engineers joined demonstrations demanding an end to the slaughter. The movement’s strength lies in its universality: it expresses the shared interests of the international working class.
Identity politics serves the ruling class by fragmenting this unity. It encourages people to view political questions through the lens of personal identity rather than social position. It substitutes demographic categories for class analysis, obscuring the fact that imperialist violence is directed not at particular racial groups but at entire populations whose land, resources and strategic position are coveted by the major powers. It reduces the struggle against genocide to a matter of “representation,” “visibility,” or “betrayed ideals,” rather than confronting the capitalist system that produces such crimes.
Moreover, identity politics provides the ruling class with a convenient ideological shield. Governments and corporations promote diversity initiatives, symbolic gestures and rhetorical acknowledgements of historical injustice while continuing to wage war, suppress dissent and attack workers’ living standards. The same institutions that celebrate “inclusion” and “equity” have supported the bombardment of Gaza, armed Israel, censored pro‑Palestinian voices and deployed police against student encampments. Identity politics allows them to present themselves as progressive while pursuing reactionary policies.
By adopting this framework, El Akkad’s book inadvertently reinforces these divisions. It interprets disillusionment as a crisis of particular groups rather than a crisis of the entire social order. In doing so, it obscures the only force capable of ending imperialist barbarism: the unified, international working class.
The embrace of the establishment: Outrage without threat
The book’s reception carries a bitter irony. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction, alongside a stream of honours from the same cultural establishment whose silence El Akkad condemns. Institutions that spent two years averting their eyes now celebrate a book about averting one’s eyes. The very editors, prize committees and cultural gatekeepers who refused to speak plainly while Gaza burned now congratulate themselves for recognising a work that laments their cowardice. In this sense, the book’s success is not a contradiction but a confirmation of El Akkad’s own prediction: the official world is already preparing to have “always been against this.”
This embrace is possible because the book, for all its anger, poses no threat to anyone. It indicts complicity, not capitalism; hypocrisy, not the profit system that requires it. It condemns silence but does not expose the class interests that make silence inevitable. It mourns the collapse of liberal ideals but does not challenge the social order that weaponises those ideals in the service of imperialist violence. A literary establishment can absorb moral outrage. It cannot absorb a programme.
The cultural institutions that now celebrate El Akkad’s book are deeply integrated into the capitalist state’s ideological apparatus. Their function is not to challenge imperialism but to manage dissent, convert political anger into safe moral sentiment, and ensure outrage never develops into revolutionary consciousness. They can reward a book that expresses sorrow, disappointment and disgust. They cannot reward a book that identifies the working class as the revolutionary force capable of ending imperialist war. They can honour a narrative of personal disillusionment. They cannot honour a call for the overthrow of the system responsible for genocide.
The establishment’s embrace of El Akkad’s book therefore reveals more about the establishment than about the book. It demonstrates bourgeois culture’s capacity to metabolise criticism, turn even the documentation of its own failures into a commodity, and present moral anguish as a substitute for political clarity. The book’s success signals not institutional repentance but institutional self‑preservation. It allows the ruling class to acknowledge “mistakes” without confronting the system that produced them.
In the end, the book’s reception underscores this review’s central argument: moral revulsion, however sincere, is not a strategy. Only a scientific, class‑based programme can confront the forces responsible for genocide, and that is precisely what the cultural establishment cannot tolerate.
What is to be done: From revulsion to revolutionary consciousness
None of this dismisses El Akkad’s sincerity or the genuine emotion the book has evoked. The disgust millions feel toward the political and media establishment is a healthy, progressive development. It marks a profound shift in consciousness: a recognition that the institutions long presented as guardians of democracy, human rights and liberal values have revealed themselves as instruments of imperialist violence. The revulsion is real, deep and justified. But disgust, however sincere, must become consciousness.
The lesson of Gaza is not that “the West” has lost its soul. It is that imperialism, in its death agony, is driving toward ever greater barbarism, including world war. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration but a warning: a demonstration of what the ruling class is prepared to do as it confronts economic crisis, geopolitical rivalry and mounting social opposition at home. The same governments that levelled Gaza are preparing for confrontation with Russia and China, expanding military budgets, militarising society and attacking democratic rights. The logic of imperialism inexorably leads to catastrophe.
Only the international working class, mobilised independently of all capitalist parties on a socialist programme, can stop it. As the WSWS editorial board has stated, the genocidal war in Gaza “can only be stopped through the unified and revolutionary action of the international working class.” This is not a rhetorical flourish but a scientific assessment of social forces. The working class, bound together across borders by global production, possesses both the objective interest and the collective power to halt the machinery of war. Dockworkers refusing to load arms shipments, autoworkers striking against militarised austerity, students defying police repression- these actions point toward the real agency capable of ending imperialist barbarism.
El Akkad’s book records the moment when a section of the liberal intelligentsia saw the abyss. But seeing the abyss is not the same as understanding it. And understanding it is not the same as developing the political perspective required to overcome it. The liberal intelligentsia recoils from genocide but remains ideologically tethered to the Democratic Party, identity politics and the moral language of individual witness. It mourns the collapse of liberal ideals but cannot conceive of a world beyond capitalism. Its despair stems from its political limitations.
The task is to explain how humanity reached the edge of the abyss and how it can escape. That requires not moral revulsion but a scientific understanding of the state’s class character, the nature of imperialism, and the historical role of the working class. It requires building a revolutionary leadership capable of turning outrage into strategy, protest into power, and moral clarity into political action. Only by consciously mobilising the international working class can we bring the profit system to its knees and finally end the barbarism it generates.
Bibliography
Primary Text
El Akkad, Omar. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
Statements, Lectures, and Editorials
North, David. “The Political Meaning of the Self‑Immolation of Aaron Bushnell.” Lecture delivered at the University of Michigan, March 2024.
World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board. “Mobilise the Working Class to Stop the Gaza Genocide.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.
North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political and Social Foundations of the January 6 Coup Attempt. Mehring Books, 2022.
North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Mehring Books, 1988.
WSWS Coverage of Gaza and Imperialism
Grey, Andre Damon, et al. “The US‑Backed Israeli Genocide in Gaza.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023–2025.
Kishore, Joseph. “The Role of the Working Class in the Fight Against Imperialist War.” World Socialist Web Site, 2024.
Van Auken, Bill. “US Imperialism and the Middle East: A Century of Intervention.” World Socialist Web Site, 2023.
Historical and Theoretical Works on Imperialism
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. 1913.
Trotsky, Leon. The War and the International. 1914.
Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.
Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program. 1938.
Works on Liberalism, Identity Politics, and the Crisis of the Intelligentsia
Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. W. W. Norton, 1995.
Journalistic and Political Context
Human Rights Watch. Israel/Palestine: Events of 2023–2025. HRW Annual Reports.
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Gaza Situation Reports, 2023–2025.
