Pip: HarperCollins cut ties with David Walliams — no formal complaint, no investigation, no specified accusation — and called it a moral stand. freerein61 has a different word for it.
Mara: This episode follows one extended argument: that corporate moralism, operating under the banner of MeToo, has become a mechanism for dismantling due process across publishing, media, and cultural life.
Pip: Let's start with the Walliams affair itself — and what it reveals about who these purges actually serve.
Corporate Moralism and the MeToo Purge
Mara: The post opens with a precise claim: HarperCollins terminated its relationship with Walliams based not on verified evidence but on unsubstantiated claims spread through media. The question the piece puts to the reader is whether this represents a failure of due process — or its deliberate rejection.
Pip: The post answers that directly. The argument runs: "The Walliams affair is not an isolated incident. Instead, it represents a recent phase of a reactionary movement that over the past ten years has gradually chipped away at fundamental democratic rights, often under the pretext of moral accountability."
Mara: So the upshot is that what looks like a publisher making a cautious HR decision is, in this reading, one data point in a longer pattern of institutional purges conducted without legal standards.
Pip: And the post names those standards' opponents by title. Senator Mazie Hirono argued the presumption of innocence makes it "really difficult for victims and survivors to come forward." Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer stated that outside court, "there is no presumption of innocence." These weren't slips — the piece treats them as the doctrine made explicit.
Mara: Which is where the corporate angle sharpens. The post argues HarperCollins acted to protect its brand and internal hierarchy, not out of moral courage — and that corporations have adopted this framework precisely because it lets them shed liabilities without legal proceedings.
Pip: Corporate governance dressed in the language of safeguarding junior staff. The post calls that the "ideological veneer for a commercial calculation" — which is a polite way of saying the morality is load-bearing decor.
Mara: The piece situates Walliams inside a documented pattern. W.W. Norton destroyed all copies of Blake Bailey's Philip Roth biography on unsubstantiated allegations. Ian Buruma was removed from the New York Review of Books for publishing an essay by Jian Ghomeshi — who had been acquitted. Hachette suppressed Woody Allen's memoir after an employee revolt. Kevin Spacey was publicly ruined before any court ruled. The post quotes critic David Walsh describing the Bailey case as "McCarthyism of an especially pernicious character."
Mara: In each instance the structure is identical: unilateral institutional action, no forum for the accused, media repetition until allegation becomes assumed fact.
Pip: The post is careful to say the working class has no particular stake in defending Walliams or HarperCollins — a millionaire entertainer and a Murdoch-owned publisher are not the sympathetic parties here. The stake is in the principles: presumption of innocence, the right to face one's accuser, the requirement of evidence.
Mara: Rights the post describes as won through centuries of struggle against arbitrary power — and as the only protections workers hold against victimization and political repression. The closing line lands hard: "The purge of cultural figures is a dress rehearsal for the repression of workers."
Pip: Which makes the question less about David Walliams and more about what gets normalized when institutions learn they can punish without evidence and call it safety.
Mara: The throughline here is a specific argument about where legal standards go when moral language fills the vacuum — and who ends up holding the controls.
Pip: Due process as a class question. That framing tends to have more runway. Worth watching where it surfaces next.
Glen Hansard died on 29 July 2026, aged 56, after a motorcycle crash in Dublin. Hours earlier, he had been at a trad session in the Wren’s Nest, singing and playing in the kind of room he always returned to: warm, unadorned, communal. The news of his death travelled quickly, and the tributes that followed spoke of a troubadour, a romantic, a man whose voice could fill a theatre and still sound like a conversation. A materialist reading begins somewhere quieter: with the working‑class Dublin that shaped him, and with the culture industry that spent decades trying to package what was, at heart, unpackageable.
He was born in Ballymun, the second of six children. His father, a carpenter and fiddle player, belonged to a generation for whom music was not a profession but a thread woven through labour and family life. Ballymun itself was built as a promise of modern housing for working people, then became a symbol of neglect. Hansard’s first musical work was on the street. As a teenager, he busked, guitar in hand, learning how to hold a crowd not through amplification or staging but through presence.
The busker is a striking figure for Marxists: a worker who sells his labour directly, without wage or boss, relying on the goodwill of strangers. It is precarious, exposed, and yet marked by a rare autonomy. Hansard carried that sensibility with him for the rest of his life. Fans often spoke of the absence of distance between him and the audience, a performer who seemed to dissolve the usual boundary between stage and floor.
His first wage‑labour in the culture industry came early, with The Commitments (1991), where he played Outspan Foster. The film’s celebration of working‑class Dublin claiming soul music mirrored something in Hansard himself: a belief that music belonged to those who needed it, not those who owned it. In 1990, he co‑founded The Frames, and for years his career was built on the road and in the live room. These were spaces where the relationship between performer and audience remained stubbornly human, resistant to being flattened into product.
Once: A Small Film About the Kindness of Strangers
Then came Once. Made on a shoestring, it became a global phenomenon, and “Falling Slowly” won the 2008 Oscar. The ceremony revealed the culture industry’s priorities: Markéta Irglová’s acceptance speech was cut short by the orchestra, restored only after a commercial break. Hansard’s own message that night was simple: make art, keep going. Yet the film’s success also turned his relationship with Irglová into marketing and touring material. Under capitalism, even intimacy becomes something you can package, promote, and sell.
When Once appeared in 2007, it looked like nothing much: a film made for almost no money, shot on borrowed locations, carried by two musicians who were not actors in any conventional sense. Yet it became one of the most quietly beloved Irish films of its generation, not because it aimed high but because it stayed close to the ground, to the street, to the shopfront, to the fragile hope that strangers might help one another for no reason other than recognition.
Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová play characters who barely have names, and that anonymity is part of the film’s truth. They are two people trying to keep going in a city that offers them little. He is a busker and repair-shop worker; she is a young immigrant holding her family together. Their connection is not romantic in the Hollywood sense. It is something smaller and more human: two people who meet at the right moment and give each other just enough encouragement to continue.
The film’s songs, written long before the script, become the emotional architecture. “Falling Slowly” is not a declaration but a plea, and the way the song grows in the cramped music shop is the film’s whole argument: that art made without permission or polish can still carry enormous weight. The recording studio scenes, with their awkwardness and sudden beauty, show collaboration as a kind of temporary shelter.
Once is often described as a fairy tale, but its magic is modest. It believes that people can help one another without owning one another, that creativity can bloom in the cracks of economic hardship, and that intimacy does not need to be consummated to matter. Its ending is gentle, unresolved, and honest.
What remains, years later, is the film’s sense of grace. It is a story about two musicians who meet briefly and change each other’s lives in ways neither fully understands. It also reminds us that some of the most enduring Irish art has been made not in studios or boardrooms but in borrowed rooms, on street corners, and in the fleeting kindness between strangers.
His most visible public act of kindness and solidarity was the annual Christmas Eve busk outside the Gaiety Theatre for the Simon Community. It was sincere, generous, and it raised real money. It also illuminated a contradiction that belongs to the times rather than to the man. In a city where housing has become a mechanism for extracting rent, the duty to shelter the vulnerable has been handed to musicians and charity collections. The busk eased the hardship of homelessness; it could not touch the structures that produce it.
What Hansard seemed to cherish most lay entirely outside the market. The pub session musicians gathered around a table, playing for no fee and no applause, is a kind of commons, a reminder of what culture looks like when it is shared rather than sold. It is fitting that hundreds of singers and buskers gathered near the Gaiety to sing for him after his death, before a public wake and a funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral. The crowd on the street was solidarity. The cathedral was the establishment paying its respects.
Hansard leaves behind songs that will be streamed, licensed and monetised long after him, mostly for the benefit of those who own the catalogue rather than those who made it. But he also leaves something harder to quantify: the memory of a working‑class Dubliner who kept returning to the street and the session, to rooms where music was made together, freely, without an invoice.
HarperCollins’ sudden termination of its relationship with David Walliams—without any formal complaint, investigation, or publicly specified accusations—signals a shift in how culture industries use themselves to enforce ideological conformity. The publisher based their decision not on verified evidence but on unsubstantiated claims spread through the media. Rumours turned into liabilities; allegations were treated as truth. This isn’t a failure of due process but its outright rejection.
The Walliams affair is not an isolated incident. Instead, it represents a recent phase of a reactionary movement that over the past ten years has gradually chipped away at fundamental democratic rights, often under the pretext of moral accountability. Although media outlets and political figures have widely hailed the # MeToo movement as a fight for justice, it has largely served as a tool for corporate moralism, enforcing intra-class conformity, and weakening essential legal safeguards.
From the beginning, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) emphasised that #MeToo was not primarily a movement to defend working-class women. Instead, privileged upper-middle-class groups led it, exploiting accusations to boost their careers, settle personal scores, and impose ideological standards across media, entertainment, and publishing. The Walliams case vividly validates this perspective.
The central point of the Walliams case isn’t that a company cut ties with a publicly known author. Instead, it’s that the separation happened precisely because no formal complaint was made. For HarperCollins, the lack of due process wasn’t an issue; they saw it as necessary to act. Prominent political leaders have openly endorsed this perspective. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Senator Mazie Hirono mentioned that the presumption of innocence “is what makes it really difficult for victims and survivors to come forward.” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer also claimed that outside court, “there is no presumption of innocence.”
These statements weren’t accidental; they highlighted the core ideology of #MeToo: legal standards are obstacles, and moral judgment should replace evidence. The Walliams affair demonstrates the logical endpoint of this doctrine. The presumption of innocence is not the casualty of #MeToo—it is the target.
HarperCollins’ decision was not an act of moral courage. It was an act of corporate governance. The publisher acted to protect its brand, its internal hierarchy, and its public image. The language of “protecting junior staff” and “ensuring a safe environment” is the ideological veneer for a commercial calculation.
Corporations have adopted #MeToo because it lets them shed liabilities without legal proceedings, adds a moral guise to their business choices, enables disciplining employees through intimidation, and distracts from their long-standing involvement in abusive workplace environments. Corporate moralism isn’t just an adjunct to profit; it functions as a governance strategy. This approach lets companies portray themselves as guardians of morality while maintaining arbitrary control over employees and contractors.
The Walliams affair is a textbook example. HarperCollins acted unilaterally, without investigation, without evidence, and without providing Walliams any forum to respond. The corporation emerged as moral arbiter; the accused was left in permanent limbo.
The Class Character of #MeToo
The liberal narrative characterises #MeToo as a rebellion of oppressed women against dominant men. However, its actual social support came mainly from the wealthy upper-middle class, including media personalities, celebrities, academics, and corporate professionals. The primary targets were mostly fellow members of the intelligentsia. Its techniques involved denunciation, media trials, and administrative purges.
HarperCollins’ so-called “junior staff” are not the true targets of this campaign; rather, they serve as its rhetorical shield. The actual aim is maintaining intra-class discipline: controlling cultural workers, enforcing ideological conformity, and illustrating that any inconvenient figure can be silenced without evidence or justice. This is why the WSWS emphasises that #MeToo is not a genuine movement for the oppressed but rather a reactionary effort by a privileged class seeking influence within capitalist systems. It functions as a way to build moral and political capital.
The Walliams case exemplifies a pattern well documented by the WSWS. In 2021, W.W. Norton “permanently” withdrew Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from publication—destroying all copies—based on allegations with no supporting evidence. As WSWS critic David Walsh noted, none of the accusers “have come forward with any evidence.” Bailey was effectively silenced without a proper process, while Norton positioned itself as a self-appointed protector of moral standards.
In 2018, Ian Buruma was ousted from the New York Review of Books after publishing an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, who had been acquitted. His “transgression” was permitting an accused individual to share his perspective. The magazine’s board carried out the removal, and media criticism fueled it further.
In 2020, Hachette suppressed Woody Allen’s memoir after an employee revolt led by Ronan Farrow. The WSWS described this as evidence that the #MeToo campaign “shows its ultra-right colours.” The publisher capitulated to moralistic pressure, abandoning any commitment to free expression.
Kevin Spacey faced public ruin well before any court dismissed the claims against him. The media played judge and jury, while corporations acted as executioners. In each instance: the institution acted unilaterally, the accused was denied a proper forum, the media repeated allegations until they seemed like facts, the corporation positioned itself as the moral authority, and the accused was left in a state of perpetual uncertainty. As Walsh described regarding the Bailey case, this resembles “McCarthyism of an especially pernicious character.” The Walliams controversy clearly fits into this problematic pattern.
The WSWS has always maintained that the working class has no stake in defending wealthy celebrities or large corporations. Walliams, a millionaire entertainer, and HarperCollins, a publishing company owned by Murdoch, are not matters of concern for workers. However, the core principles involved—the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, and the need for evidence—are fundamentally important to the working class.
These rights were won through centuries of struggle against arbitrary state and corporate power. They are the only protections workers possess against victimisation, frame‑ups, and political repression. When these rights are dismantled in the cultural sphere, the consequences inevitably spread to workplaces, universities, and political life. The purge of cultural figures is a dress rehearsal for the repression of workers. This is why the WSWS defended the Depp verdict, the dismissal of claims against Spacey, and other cases where the accused were not politically sympathetic figures. The issue is not the individual. It is the democratic right.
The #MeToo framework serves a wider ideological aim: it fragments individuals by instilling fear of accusation, erodes solidarity by turning colleagues into potential informants, prioritises subjective feelings over objective facts, replaces legal standards with moralistic condemnation, and conditions society to accept punishment without evidence. This isn’t a pursuit of justice but a tool of social control.
HarperCollins’ choice reflects more a blend of moral rhetoric and business interests than a moral reckoning. It shows how moral language becomes a tool for corporate influence. The Walliams incident exposes the breakdown of fair process, the growth of media-driven trials, the increasing corporate dominance over cultural spaces, and the susceptibility of cultural workers to unfair punishment. It also highlights how #MeToo has become an ideological instrument of discipline. This trend is reactionary and must be challenged, not in support of David Walliams, but to defend the democratic rights of working-class individuals.
Sources
Walsh, David. “The #MeToo campaign versus the presumption of innocence.” World Socialist Web Site, 2018.
Walsh, David. “W.W. Norton’s pulping of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth.” WSWS, 2021.
Reiss, Rebecca. “Ian Buruma fired from NYRB.” WSWS, 2018.
Pip: Bob Dylan walked off The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 rather than drop a satirical song. Ed Sheeran, six decades later, quietly dropped his opening act instead. The distance between those two moments is the subject of today's episode.
Mara: freerein61 traces that distance through the economics of the modern culture industry — how corporate consolidation, financialization, and brand logic have made political courage structurally impossible for contemporary artists.
Pip: Let's start with the two singers themselves, and what the gap between them actually tells us.
Two Singers, Two Eras: Capital, Culture, and the Cost of Conscience
Mara: The central tension here is not really about personal courage. It is about what the structure of the culture industry, at two different historical moments, makes possible or forecloses for an artist who wants to take a political stand.
Pip: And the inciting event is concrete. On June 23, 2024, at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore briefly expressed support for Palestinians from the stage — and was quietly removed from the rest of Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour with no formal explanation given.
Mara: Sheeran's public response leaned on corporate neutral language. The post quotes him directly: he emphasized that the tour aimed for "inclusivity" and that "various ways of promoting peace" should be accepted — framing the deliberate bombing of civilians as a matter of personal style or opinion.
Pip: That is a remarkable sentence to write about children starving, and the post earns its anger there.
Mara: The argument is that Sheeran's language was not personal cowardice but a structural outcome. Behind the tour sits a layered corporate network — Wasserman Media Group, Robert Kraft, AEG, Live Nation — whose ownership links extend to private equity and global real estate. Music economist Peter Tschmuck is quoted: "the live music sector has become one of the most financialised segments of the cultural industries."
Pip: So the upshot is that a political statement by an opening act is no longer just an awkward moment — it is a liability that can threaten a multi-million-dollar global production.
Mara: Dylan's 1963 walkout from The Ed Sullivan Show is the counterpoint. CBS demanded he drop "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" over advertiser pressure. He refused and left. The post is careful not to romanticize this — Dylan later framed it as artistic self-respect, not politics — but the historical conditions matter. As historian Michael Denning is quoted: "the cultural front of the mid-century United States was shaped by a sense of collective struggle."
Pip: The civil rights movement, the folk revival, the early anti-war left — artists had a public sphere that could absorb and even reward dissent. That infrastructure is gone now.
Mara: The post traces its disappearance to decades of consolidation. Live Nation, AEG, Universal, Sony now control touring, ticketing, venue ownership, streaming, and merchandising in vertically integrated structures. Media scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser captures the result: "brand culture transforms political expression into reputational risk."
Pip: The conclusion the post reaches is deliberately structural, not moral. Sheeran is not the villain; the system is. And Dylan is not the hero — he spent the following decade distancing himself from political readings of his own work.
Mara: The closing argument is direct: "Dylan's refusal belonged to a moment when the relationship between capital and culture still contained cracks through which dissent could occasionally surface. Sheeran's capitulation belongs to a moment when those cracks have been sealed."
Pip: Which leaves the question of what, if anything, comes next — for artists, and for the audiences who consume what the industry permits.
Mara: The through-line across all of this is structural — not who chose wrong, but what the system makes chooseable.
Pip: Sixty years of consolidation is a long arc to reverse. Whether culture can find its cracks again is the question the next episode will probably not answer either, but it is worth asking.
The exclusion of Macklemore from Ed Sheeran’s 2024 Loop Tour, after his brief show of support for Palestinians, was more than just an industry controversy. It highlighted a key moment in how contemporary culture’s political economy operates, showing how deeply the modern music scene has intertwined with corporate, financial, and geopolitical influences. Sheeran’s later comments, expressed through themes of “inclusivity” and “alternative methods of promoting peace”, were not merely neutral. They were ideological acts influenced by the structural pressures of a culture industry that views even minor dissent as a threat to capital.
Understanding this capitulation’s importance is easier when you compare it to an earlier moment. In 1963, Bob Dylan refused to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show after CBS insisted he remove “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satirical take on Cold War anti-communism. While Dylan’s walkout is often romanticised, its true significance lies in what it exposes about the conditions for artistic independence in mid-20th-century America- conditions that have been steadily eroded over six decades of media consolidation, financialization, and the embedding of cultural production within global capital networks.
This article analyses these two episodes not as moral stories but as actions rooted in their historical context and shaped by changing dynamics between capital and culture. It suggests that Sheeran’s actions are not unusual but a logical result of an industry whose economic structure makes political bravery almost impossible. Meanwhile, Dylan’s refusal, though somewhat self-serving and limited, came at a time when artists still believed they could join wider social movements and reach a public sphere not yet completely dominated by corporate interests.
The Macklemore Episode: A Case Study in Contemporary Cultural Repression
On June 23, 2024, at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore briefly expressed support for Palestinians, citing reports of mass killings and starvation from humanitarian agencies and the UN. Shortly afterwards, he was discreetly pulled from the rest of Sheeran’s Loop Tour dates. No formal reason was provided, but industry sources indicated the move was driven by worries about “brand safety,” sponsor relationships, and the political considerations of large venue operators.
Sheeran’s public response exemplified neutral corporate language. He emphasised that the tour aimed for “inclusivity” and that “various ways of promoting peace” should be accepted, framing the deliberate bombing of civilians as a matter of personal style or opinion. The complex political situation in Gaza was obscured behind a cloud of “perspectives,” a phrase that echoes corporate PR tactics meant to sidestep reputational damage.
The Corporate Ecosystem Behind Sheeran
Sheeran’s touring setup is a structured corporate network, not a loose collection of musicians and promoters. It includes: Casey Wasserman, CEO of Wasserman Media Group, a major player in sports and entertainment, whose name appeared in Epstein-related reports (see: The Guardian, 2023); Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, who announced a Gaza relief effort with Sheeran soon after controversy widely seen as an attempt to improve optics on Macklemore’s removal through charity rather than moral stance; and multinational touring giants AEG and Live Nation, whose ownership links extend to private equity, defence industry investors, and global real estate holdings.
The current touring industry is a complex network of sponsorships, insurance policies, venue arrangements, and investor demands. According to music economist Peter Tschmuck, “the live music sector has become one of the most financialised segments of the cultural industries” (Tschmuck, The Economics of Music, 2021). In this context, even a small political statement by an opening act can pose a risk.
The lesson for working musicians is straightforward: solidarity can be negotiated, and silence often comes at a cost. The Macklemore incident demonstrates that the culture industry now not only discourages dissent but actively monitors and suppresses it. Media scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser notes that “brand culture transforms political expression into reputational risk” (Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 2018). Sheeran’s reaction was not merely personal cowardice but a result of conforming to the system’s pressures.
Dylan’s 1963 Walkout: A Moment When Refusal Was Still Possible
In May 1963, Bob Dylan was set to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, a major platform in American entertainment. He planned to sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which satirised Cold War fears. However, CBS’s standards department, worried about potential lawsuits from the John Birch Society and influenced by advertisers, insisted he drop the song. Dylan declined and walked off the stage. While this act has become legendary, its importance isn’t just about Dylan’s personal integrity; he later said it was about artistic self-respect rather than politics, but about the broader historical context that made such a refusal possible.
The early 1960s marked a time when many American artists still saw themselves as linked to larger social movements: the civil rights movement, which generated a public arena open to moral appeals; the early anti-war left, which had not yet been suppressed by government repression; and the folk revival, grounded in union halls, Popular Front traditions, and the influence of artists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
As historian Michael Denning writes, “the cultural front of the mid‑century United States was shaped by a sense of collective struggle” (Denning, The Cultural Front, 1997). Even commercial artists could plausibly imagine that refusing a network broadcast might strengthen their connection to an audience.
In 1963, the media industry was characterised by capitalism, censorship, and a focus on advertising. However, it had not yet experienced the level of consolidation and financialization that would reshape it in later decades. Occasional dissent emerged through the system’s weaknesses. Dylan’s refusal was expensive, but the cost was assessed within a public sphere not yet dominated by corporate interests.
From Dylan to Sheeran: The Transformation of the Culture Industry
Since the 1980s, the entertainment industry has consolidated significantly. Major companies such as Live Nation, AEG, Universal Music Group, and Sony have acquired smaller firms, forming vertically integrated conglomerates that oversee touring, ticketing, venue ownership, artist management, streaming platforms, and merchandising. As media scholar David Hesmondhalgh observes, “the cultural industries have become increasingly dominated by large corporations whose interests are aligned with global finance” (Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2019).
The contemporary touring industry is dominated by financial tools such as tour insurance backed by major banks, sponsorship agreements tied to safety algorithms, investor expectations for quarterly gains, and venue deals linked to real estate portfolios. A political act today can do more than cancel a broadcast; it can jeopardise an entire multi-million-dollar global production. Sociologist Saskia Sassen notes that “financialisation transforms cultural production into a site of risk management” (Sassen, Expulsions, 2014).
The language used in modern entertainment terms like “inclusivity,” “diverse perspectives,” and “complex situations” acts as a solvent, blending political realities into a cloud of personal feelings and brand image. Discussions on Gaza are reduced to issues of “tone,” while children’s starvation becomes a matter of “perspective,” and dissent is dismissed as “miscommunication.” This isn’t accidental; it reflects a cultural framework in which capital has absorbed and neutralised the remaining traces of oppositional artistic identity.
Why Sheeran’s Capitulation Was Inevitable
The modern pop star isn’t an independent cultural figure but rather part of a corporate supply chain. People view their political statements not as genuine expression but as potential risks. Sheeran’s surrender wasn’t a sign of weakness; it was the inevitable outcome for an artist ingrained in a financialised cultural system. Unlike Dylan, Sheeran can’t rely on a public platform that supports dissent. Streaming services, algorithmic feeds, and brand-centric fan cultures have fragmented the collective political awareness that once fostered oppositional art.
The civil rights movement, anti-war activism, and the labour-inspired folk revival gave mid-century artists a shared sense of collective struggle. Today, no comparable large-scale movements exist in the United States or Britain. Modern artists tend to be isolated, fragmented, and largely reliant on corporate sponsorship.
We shouldn’t canonise Dylan. He mostly distanced himself from political interpretations of his work in the following decade, and the demands of the culture industry shaped his later career. Yet, even a short, self-interested rejection in 1963 illustrates how modern artists are caught in a system that views conscience as a contractual breach. The crucial difference isn’t moral strength, but the opportunities history provides.
The Sheeran–Macklemore episode is not a footnote. It is a symptom of a culture industry that has reached a terminal stage of integration with the ruling class’s political and economic interests. The entertainment sector does not merely avoid controversy; it polices dissent. It does not merely reflect political cowardice; it manufactures it.
Dylan’s refusal belonged to a moment when the relationship between capital and culture still contained cracks through which dissent could occasionally surface. Sheeran’s capitulation belongs to a moment when those cracks have been sealed.
The task for artists and for audiences is not to search for heroes within this system. It is to recognise that the system itself is the problem. Culture cannot be liberated from cowardice until it is liberated from capital.
Sources
Banet‑Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press, 2018.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1997.
Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. 4th ed., Sage, 2019.
Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Tschmuck, Peter. The Economics of Music. Springer, 2021.
The Guardian. “Epstein Documents Reveal New Names.” 2023.
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). “Gaza Humanitarian Update.” 2024.
Variety, Billboard, and Rolling Stone reporting on the Macklemore–Sheeran incident (2024).
Pip: A 1968 Star Trek episode walks into a congressional hearing, sits down next to a founder warning about catastrophic AI risk, and nobody blinks — because the script hasn't changed.
Mara: That continuity is exactly what freerein61 is writing about at A Trumpet of Sedition — the ideology underneath the automation debate, who owns the machines, and what the Federation's post-scarcity world quietly erases. Let's start with the class question hiding inside the alignment discourse.
The Ultimate Computer and the Class Question Behind AI Alignment
Pip: The setup here is a Star Trek episode from 1968 that frames machine autonomy as a psychological crisis — a damaged genius, his overambitious machine, a very personal breakdown. The question is why that same frame is still doing ideological work in 2026, in corporate manifestos and national-security hearings.
Mara: The post is direct about why: "This continuity is not coincidental; it is ideological. A more advanced social analysis has not replaced the Daystrom narrative because the very class that benefits from it has industrialised that perspective."
Pip: So the Daystrom frame isn't just a cultural echo — it's actively maintained, because it routes the automation question through individual psychology and engineering conscience rather than ownership and class interest.
Mara: The Anthropic case is the worked example. A genuine internal researcher warning gets converted into justification for corporate-selected evaluators, national-security integration, and tighter monopoly control ahead of an IPO. The post calls this plainly: "not about safety — a class strategy."
Pip: The ruling class as both arsonist and fire brigade is a phrase that earns its keep.
Mara: Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier" gets the same treatment — progress must slow, but only the people creating the risk may manage it. The alignment debate, in this reading, is the ideological mechanism that keeps the ownership question off the table entirely.
Pip: And underneath all of it is a Marxist argument about value — living labour as the only source of surplus value, which means full automation isn't capital's triumph but its structural contradiction.
Mara: The post puts it squarely: the so-called ultimate computer, complete automation, does not represent capital's achievement but its own demise. That's the break point the Daystrom narrative cannot reach, because reaching it would require depicting the class whose struggle resolves it.
Pip: Kirk talks M-5 into dying by appealing to its conscience. The individual engineer, sovereign over the machine — very tidy, very bourgeois.
Mara: The post contrasts that directly with the SEP's Ninth Congress resolution: expropriate the tech monopolies, place AI under democratic workers' control, shorten the working week with no loss of pay. The Federation's post-scarcity world skips that entire process — abundance without expropriation, planning without class conflict.
Pip: A utopia that forgot to have the revolution.
Mara: Which is precisely the argument — the Federation isn't socialism realized, it's the erasure of the revolutionary process needed to get there. And the alignment discourse is its contemporary form: the ideological veil that keeps the social question unasked. Sanders' sovereign wealth fund, Trump's executive order, Altman's bailout framing — all assume private ownership stays intact.
Pip: Same script, updated cast. The Federation was always the justification — that's the line the piece ends on, and it lands.
Mara: On the political economy, the post points toward what happens when containment mechanisms from the postwar period — retraining programs, union-led adjustments — no longer exist, and the pseudo-left has no alternative except appeals to the same oligarchs deploying the technology. The Daystrom frame returns because there's nothing to replace it.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is a question the Federation structurally cannot ask — who owns the means of computation, and whose interests does deployment serve.
Pip: And if the answer requires depicting a class whose struggle resolves it, bourgeois utopianism will keep finding reasons to cut to commercial. More on what that struggle looks like — next time.
The resurgence of automation anxiety in the twenty-first century reveals a peculiar sense of historical symmetry. In 1968, Star Trek’s “The Ultimate Computer” framed machine autonomy as a psychological crisis, focusing on the damaged genius Daystrom, the overambitious engineer, and the machine that reflects its creator’s neurosis. Fast forward to 2026, and the same story unfolds this time not on TV, but in congressional hearings, corporate manifestos, and national-security directives. This continuity is not coincidental; it is ideological. A more advanced social analysis has not replaced the Daystrom narrative because the very class that benefits from it has industrialised that perspective.
To grasp this continuity and its hidden political stakes, we must revisit the question the episode raises but leaves unanswered: who deploys the machine, and whose interests does it serve? This question is not only missing from the narrative; the Federation’s utopian premise inherently prevents addressing it. The post-scarcity world does not represent socialism realised but rather the erasure of the revolutionary process needed to attain it. It signifies abundance without expropriation, planning without class conflict, and social harmony without overthrowing the ruling class. The Federation is not just a reason for the episode’s avoidance; it is the very reason for it.
The Industrialisation of the Daystrom Frame
The 2026 alignment debate focused on fears of “catastrophic risk” and the idea that only founders can manage the threats they have generated, embodying a modern version of Daystrom’s crisis, not merely a metaphor. The WSWS’s investigation into the Anthropic incident demonstrates this clearly. What starts as a genuine internal warning from a researcher quickly transforms into a justification for “embedded evaluators” chosen by corporations, integrating AI into national security, and tightening monopoly control before an IPO. This is not about ‘safety’; it is a class strategy. Catastrophe is depicted as an engineering failure that can only be fixed by the same elite whose competitive nature caused the danger. The ruling class acts as both arsonist and fire brigade.
Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier” vividly exemplifies this ideology. It resembles Daystrom without drama: progress must slow down yet continue; risks must be controlled but only by those creating them; disaster is near, yet only the oligarchs can prevent it. The debate around alignment serves as the ideological shield that keeps ownership unchallenged. It turns a societal conflict capitalism’s tendency to replace living labour into a technical issue for specialists. The Daystrom analogy is not just a storytelling device; it embodies the worldview of the class that owns the means of computation.
Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and “The Ultimate Computer” resolve their crises through qualities considered inherently human: conscience, cunning, stubbornness, and the engineer’s triumph over machines. This reflects the ideology of the petty-bourgeois class that creates these machines under capitalism’s influence, centred on the fantasy of individual mastery and the belief that the engineer’s moral insight can fix systemic issues. However, the truly irreducible element which neither work can explicitly define is labour itself.
Living human labour is the only source of value, with profit coming from extracting surplus labour. A production process that removes living labour does not generate surplus value. The so-called “ultimate computer”, the dream of complete automation, does not represent capital’s achievement but its own demise. This is where the system’s inherent contradiction reaches a breaking point.
Bourgeois imagination cannot capture this reality. Acknowledging labour as the core element means accepting the class that exploits it, which underpins society. It involves confronting the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, transforming revolution from a moral choice into a historical necessity. The truly human aspect is not conscience, but the labour process itself, the one part capital cannot automate without risking its own existence.
The Federation’s post-scarcity world is frequently seen as a utopian ideal realisation of socialism. However, it is not that. It represents the erasure of the revolutionary process needed to attain abundance. This future envisions the absence of class conflict, not its resolution. Productive forces have been socialised, but without expropriating the expropriators. Ownership has shifted in humanity’s favour, yet without the conflict or process needed to establish it.
This is why the Federation cannot pose the question “who owns the means of computation.” It has overlooked the class whose ownership would need to be abolished. The future seems already decided because the process required to settle it, the revolutionary takeover of productive forces, is exactly what bourgeois utopianism fails to portray. The Federation is not a utopia; it is a bourgeois illusion of abundance that exists without class conflict.
The Answer the Episode Cannot Give
The episode’s key question, “who decides to deploy the machine, and whose interests are served?” is deliberately avoided because it is politically sensitive. The whole discussion about alignment is designed to keep this question unasked. The reality is that the capitalist class uses AI against the working class, and the solution lies in expropriation, not in regulation, “responsible scaling,” engineer heroism, founder conscience, or technical alignment expertise.
The productive forces of AI, built from the general intellect and the accumulated knowledge of generations, must be seized from private ownership and placed under democratic workers’ control. The SEP’s Ninth Congress resolution articulates the only program adequate to the contradiction: expropriate the tech monopolies; transform them into public utilities; guarantee no job losses to automation; shorten the working week with no loss of pay; direct AI toward human need and global planning. This is the precise opposite of the episode’s resolution. Kirk persuades M‑5 to die by appealing to its inherited conscience: the individual must remain sovereign over the machine. The Marxist resolution is collective: the working class must become sovereign over the means of production, machine included. The episode cannot depict this because it cannot depict the class whose struggle would make it possible.
The Historical Hinge: 1966 and 2026
The initial wave of post-war automation fears was genuine, but it was managed through class-compromise strategies like retraining, controlled decline, and union-led adjustments. Currently, no such containment mechanisms exist. The pseudo-left and unions lack a clear plan, instead making appeals to the same oligarchs responsible for deploying the technology. Sanders’ proposal for an “AI sovereign wealth fund” aligns with Trump’s executive order and Altman’s bailout plan, all assuming that private ownership remains unchallenged. This is why the Daystrom framing has returned in industrial form. It is the ideological substitute for the class question that can no longer be deferred.
The episode did not envision a future in which ownership was resolved in humanity’s favour. Instead, it dismissed the revolution needed to settle it. The Federation’s post-scarcity environment is not a utopian ideal but an ideological façade, a means to evade the social conflict revealed by automation. The underlying lesson is not that we lack the Federation’s justification. Rather, the Federation has always been the justification.
The bourgeois utopia of post‑scarcity without expropriation is the ideological veil that prevents us from asking the social question. The alignment discourse is its modern form. And the task of Marxist criticism and Marxist politics is to tear that veil away.
Further Reading
I. Primary Texts: Star Trek, Kubrick, and Automation
Star Trek: The Original Series, “The Ultimate Computer,” Season 2, Episode 24 (1968).
Star Trek: The Original Series, “The Return of the Archons,” Season 1, Episode 21 (1967).
Star Trek: The Original Series, “A Taste of Armageddon,” Season 1, Episode 23 (1967).
2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (New American Library, 1972).
Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (Ballantine Books, 1968).
II. Marxist Theory: Labour, Value, Automation, and the General Intellect
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I–III (Penguin Classics editions).
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics).
Especially the “Fragment on Machines” (pp. 690–712), on automation and the general intellect.
Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937).
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (Verso, 1975).
Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, Vol. II (Monthly Review Press, 1968).
Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital (Pluto Press, 1977).
III. Contemporary Marxist Analysis of AI and Automation
Socialist Equality Party (US), Resolution of the Ninth Congress on Artificial Intelligence and the Class Struggle (2024).
Key line: “Value, as Marx demonstrated, is created by living human labour, and profit is derived from the surplus value extracted from the worker.”
World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), coverage of AI, Anthropic, and national‑security integration:
WSWS report on the Anthropic researcher warning and its political appropriation.
David North, The Crisis of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party (Mehring Books).
Nick Beams, “Automation, AI, and the Contradictions of Capitalism,” WSWS lectures (2023–2026).
IV. AI Alignment Ideology, Corporate Power, and the Tech Oligarchy
Dario Amodei, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Anthropic (2024).
Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything” (2021).
Sam Altman, statements on sovereign wealth funds and AI industrial policy (2023–2026).
US Executive Orders on AI (2023–2026), including national‑security integration.
EU AI Act (2024–2026 drafts and revisions).
Timnit Gebru et al., “Stochastic Parrots: On the Dangers of Predicting the Future with Language Models” (FAccT, 2021).
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021).
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).
V. Automation History: Postwar Panic and the 1966 Commission
US National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress (1966).
Technology and the American Economy (Government Printing Office, 1966).
Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post‑Industrial Society (1973).
James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (1963).
Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work (1995).
VI. Scholarship on Star Trek, Utopianism, and Post‑Scarcity Ideology
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005).
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale University Press, 1979).
Lincoln Geraghty, Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (I.B. Tauris, 2007).
Daniel Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Racing Toward a White Future (Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Mark Dredze & Darcie Draudt‑Véjares, “Our Final Frontier? Star Trek and the Post‑AI Society,” Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute panel (2026).
Joyce Hunter, “Stardate 2026: What a 1968 Star Trek Episode Gets Exactly Right About AI,” LinkedIn (2026).
VII. Political Economy of Technology and Capitalist Crisis
Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso, 2006).
Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Haymarket Books, 2016).
Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production (2012).
Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? (Verso, 2016).
Aaron Benanav, Automation and the Future of Work (Verso, 2020).
VIII. AI, Labour, and the State: Reports and Policy Documents
OECD, AI and the Future of Skills (2025).
International Labour Organisation (ILO), Work in the Age of AI (2024).
UK House of Lords, AI in the UK: No Room for Complacency (2024).
US Department of Defence, AI and Autonomy Integration Strategy (2025).
RAND Corporation, AI, National Security, and Strategic Competition (2024).
IX. Additional Theoretical Works Relevant to the Argument
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Alfred Sohn‑Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour (1978).
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004).
Notes on Search‑Grounded Sources
The following items were directly retrieved from the search results you requested and are included above:
Hopkins at Home / Our Final Frontier? Star Trek and the Post‑AI Society (2026)analysis of Star Trek’s automation and post‑scarcity framing.
Joyce Hunter, “Stardate 2026: What a 1968 Star Trek Episode Gets Exactly Right About AI”, contemporary reading of “The Ultimate Computer.”
Johns Hopkins Hub event description on Star Trek, automation, and AI governance.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” — Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” — Leon Trotsky, 1933
“The twentieth century ended in a global disorder whose origins lay in the very triumph of capitalism.” — Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes*
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides
Gideon Rachman’s latest book emerges at a time when a strange mix of alarm and self-justification grips defenders of Western capitalism. The post-Cold War order, once hailed as the “end of history,” has crumbled before them, yet they struggle to explain why. Their analyses swing between moral outrage and geopolitical speculation, addressing symptoms but missing the core issues. Rachman’s “War Is Interested in You” exemplifies this pattern: sincere and anxious, but lacking depth.
The book’s title, inspired by Leon Trotsky, stands out as its most intriguing and revealing aspect. Trotsky’s 1933 warning, made during the period leading to a second imperialist war, was more than a clever saying; it encapsulated Marxist principles. He argued that war is not caused by individual leaders’ madness or diplomatic errors but is an unavoidable result of a global capitalist system whose productive forces have surpassed the boundaries of nation-states and private ownership of the means of production. War, in Trotsky’s view, “interests” humanity because society remains stuck in a social structure that fails to organise its economy rationally. Rachman takes the phrase but ignores the analysis behind it. Consequently, his book hints at disaster but fails to examine its root causes.
Trotsky’s Warning and Its Historical Meaning
To understand the irony of Rachman’s title, one must return to Trotsky’s original context. In War and the Fourth International, Trotsky explained that the coming world war was not the product of Hitler’s psychology or Mussolini’s theatricality. It resulted from the objective contradictions of imperialism: the uneven development of capitalism, the struggle for markets and raw materials, and the inability of competing national bourgeoisies to resolve their conflicts peacefully.
Trotsky’s approach was rooted in Marx’s view of capitalism as a worldwide system driven by the growth of value. Lenin later stated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that the concentration of capital, the rise of monopolies, and the division of the world among competing powers made war a structural element rather than an anomaly. The nation-state, initially a facilitator of capitalist development, eventually became an obstacle to productive forces. Consequently, economic growth could occur only through geopolitical conflict. Trotsky’s warning was thus not about morality but a scientific forecast: war would reemerge because the underlying system that causes it remained in place. Rachman’s book, by contrast, treats war as a kind of psychological contagion, a product of “strongmen,” nationalism, and bad leadership. The structural analysis disappears. The historical method evaporates. What remains is a morality play.
Rachman’s main argument revisits his earlier idea from The Age of the Strongman: the collapse of the post-Cold War “rules-based order” is caused by a worldwide surge of dysfunctional leaders—Putin, Xi, Trump, Erdoğan, Modi—whose individual flaws have undermined global stability. This stance is akin to attributing climate change solely to short-term weather patterns.
The promotional material presents the argument using common establishment language. It states that after 1991, the United States “dominated” the world; now, “weakening Western power” creates opportunities for challengers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Additionally, Trump’s time in office has increased volatility. The underlying message is clear: the world was stable before problematic figures appeared. This is historical idealism of the most superficial kind. It treats geopolitics as a drama of personalities rather than a struggle of social forces. It reduces imperialism to psychology. It replaces political economy with pop sociology.
The decline of American dominance is a structural shift, not just psychological. Factors such as the diminishing US economic lead, China’s rise as a comprehensive industrial competitor, the decline of Bretton Woods institutions, and challenges to neoliberalism have reshaped the global order, making the old imperial framework unsustainable. The “strongmen” are not the root cause but rather the political manifestation of these changes. Rachman’s narrative misplaces causality, turning a capitalist crisis into a crisis of personalities. Imperialism becomes a morality tale, and history becomes a recruitment call.
The Ideologist of a Collapsing Order
Remembering who is speaking is crucial. Rachman isn’t just a critic analysing the international order’s collapse; he’s deeply embedded within it. For twenty years, he’s provided the Financial Times, London’s leading financial publication, with arguments defending the policies that have led to the current geopolitical crises he now observes with concern.
His career path mirrors the ideological influences dominant in the post-Cold War period. After spending fifteen years at The Economist, he became chief foreign affairs columnist at the FT in 2006, positioning himself at the heart of the Anglo-American policy elite. Diplomats, bankers, intelligence officers, and corporate leaders read his columns—the very groups whose choices have driven the global changes he now criticises.
Rachman’s stance on Ukraine is exemplary. While realist scholars like John Mearsheimer warned that NATO’s eastward expansion could provoke Russia, Rachman condemned them as Kremlin allies. He firmly believed the war stemmed solely from Russian aggression, disregarding three decades of US and NATO policies. He even argued that, although Russia “specialises in outright lies,” the US only “specialises in hypocrisy”—a point likely to amuse anyone familiar with the falsehoods used to justify the Iraq War.
As the conflict intensified, Rachman consistently asserted that the war should persist until Ukraine gains the upper hand, unintentionally supporting a proxy war that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of workers on both sides. The World Socialist Web Site noted that he functions as an indirect defender of NATO—though perhaps “unwitting” is too lenient. Now, this same individual appears to caution the public that the world risks sliding into a third world war. It’s hard not to see the absurdity of an arsonist issuing fire safety advice.
Rachman’s book highlights a broader intellectual crisis among the Western ruling class. The dominant post-1991 ideology—comprising liberal internationalism, neoliberal economics, and American unipolarity—has disintegrated, yet its supporters struggle to explain why. Their analyses are lacking three key elements: markets, production, finance, and class relations. Instead, the world economy is portrayed merely as scenery for geopolitical conflicts, not as the driving force behind them.
Rachman seldom uses the term “imperialism,” probably only for rhetorical effect, as it doesn’t fit with his worldview. He perceives the United States as a benevolent hegemon rather than an imperial power. NATO is seen as a defensive alliance rather than a vehicle of Western dominance. China isn’t viewed as a rival capitalist state, but as an authoritarian challenger. Similarly, Russia is not considered a declining imperial power but rather a rogue actor. Rachman’s analysis omits the working class, peasantry, and oppressed nations. He argues that leaders, not masses, shape history; elites, not classes, shape politics; and states, not social forces, shape war. This approach results in an analysis that fails to explain the world because it cannot truly see it.
Rachman suggests a familiar remedy: increased Western leadership, stricter alliance discipline, greater investment in the rules-based system, and renewed confidence in the imperial institutions whose ongoing crises have led to the wars he describes. The book advocates restoring the previous status quo—a world where American dominance remains uncontested, and the liberal order can return to normal functioning.
This longstanding deadlock in bourgeois liberalism lets it identify symptoms clearly—Rachman, intelligent and well-connected to political and intelligence elites, offers many anecdotal details. Still, it struggles to trace these issues to their origins. Doing so would mean criticising the capitalist system and the imperial powers Rachman has committed his career to defending. The book replaces political economy with psychology, class interest with personality, and the objective laws of capitalist development with “strongmen”. It offers a diagnosis that ultimately fails to diagnose, a warning that cannot truly warn, and a lament that struggles to grasp what it laments.
To truly grasp Rachman’s worldview, one must revisit the Marxist analysis he overlooks. The current crisis isn’t merely due to poor leadership or nationalist issues; rather, it results from four interconnected contradictions. After World War II, the United States became the leading global power in industry, finance, and military strength, with unparalleled influence over global GDP, international finance, and military reach. However, this dominance has weakened over time as capitalism has evolved. The rise of China, the reindustrialisation of East Asia, and the financialisation of the US economy have collectively created a global landscape where American supremacy is no longer sustainable.
China’s transformation from a marginal economy to a major global industrial power is one of the most significant changes of the past fifty years. Its integration into the international market has made it a fierce competitor, challenging US dominance at its core. This shift has sparked increasing conflicts across economic, technological, and military spheres. The neoliberal approach—favouring privatisation, deregulation, financialisation, and globalisation—has reached its breaking point. It has caused extreme inequality, political unrest, and economic instability. The 2008 financial crisis revealed the flaws of financialised capitalism; the pandemic worsened them, and the geopolitical tensions of the 2020s have accelerated these trends.
The illusion of a unipolar world after the Cold War has disappeared. The world is now again split among rival imperial powers. The United States, China, Russia, the European Union, and regional players like India and Turkey are vying for influence, markets, and strategic positions. Consequently, war is not just a possibility but a persistent feature of the global landscape. Rachman’s book falls short because it fails to recognise capitalism as a systemic force.
The tragedy—and irony—is that Rachman’s title inadvertently points to the only meaningful solution to the crisis he discusses. Trotsky did not tell his readers to rely on better politicians or a return to a balance of power. Instead, he argued that war is unavoidable as long as humanity’s productive forces are confined within competing capitalist nation-states. The only entity capable of stopping a new world war is the international working class, organised independently of all national bourgeoisies and fighting for a socialist reorganisation of society globally.
Rachman’s book offers no such insights. It is essentially a collection of establishment fears, authored by someone whose career has involved defending the very imperial policies that have pushed the world to the edge. While war may indeed concern us all, fighting it effectively demands understanding and political strength—neither of which this book delivers.
The Ideology of a Dying Order
War Is Interested in You isn’t a serious critique of the global crisis; instead, it symbolises it. It illustrates the intellectual fatigue of a ruling elite that can no longer explain the world they built. Written by someone who helped construct the very system now collapsing, it is a lament. Its significance lies more in its expressions of anxiety than in its arguments. It exposes a ruling class that senses impending disaster but cannot grasp its root causes. Like a fever dream, it is intense, fearful, and completely unable to diagnose the crisis.
Trotsky’s warning is just as relevant now as it was in 1933. War remains largely driven by interests, but only the international working class, equipped with a Marxist worldview and organised for socialist change, can prevent it. Rachman’s book lacks this understanding and therefore lacks that power. It is a plea to restore an order that cannot be rebuilt, authored by someone who fails to understand why.
Primary Sources: Gideon Rachman’s Works
Rachman, Gideon. War Is Interested in You: The Breakdown of International Order and the Threat of World War Three. Vintage Publishing, 2026. 336 pp. ISBN 9781529969825. (Publisher summary, bibliographic details, and promotional framing)
Rachman, Gideon. The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy around the World. Various editions, 2022–2024. (Referenced for thematic continuity and Rachman’s “strongman” thesis)
Rachman, Gideon. Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century. Vintage, 2016. (Contextual background on Rachman’s geopolitical worldview)
Rachman, Gideon. Zero-Sum World: Politics, Power and Prosperity After the Crash. Atlantic Books, 2010. (Used to situate Rachman’s post‑2008 analysis of global capitalism)
Penguin Books UK promotional material for War Is Interested in You. (Publisher framing, endorsements, and thematic description)
Secondary Sources: Commentary, Critique, and Context
World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). “On the origins of the war in Ukraine: A reply to Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times.” (Critical analysis of Rachman’s Ukraine commentary and NATO apologetics; used to contextualise his ideological role.)
Wikipedia entry on Gideon Rachman. (Biographical details: FT role, Economist tenure, Orwell Prize, career trajectory.)
Marxist Theoretical Sources (Classical)
(Not retrieved via search, but essential for the theoretical framework of your essay. These are standard scholarly references and do not require citations from the search tool.)
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vols. I–III. (Foundational analysis of capitalist production, crisis, and global expansion.)
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. (Framework for analysing inter‑imperialist rivalry and the structural roots of war.)
Trotsky, Leon. “War and the Fourth International” (1933). (Source of the epigram “You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you,” and the theoretical foundation for your critique.)
Historical and Analytical Works (Contextual)
(Standard references; included for completeness of a scholarly bibliography.)
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. (Context for the collapse of the post‑Cold War order.)
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. (Useful for framing neoliberalism, uneven development, and geopolitical conflict.)
Callinicos, Alex. Imperialism and Global Political Economy. (Contemporary Marxist analysis of US decline and China’s rise.)
Panitch, Leo & Gindin, Sam. The Making of Global Capitalism. (Analysis of US-led globalisation and the contradictions of American hegemony.)
Publisher and Retailer Metadata
Amazon UK Author Page for Gideon Rachman. (Publication dates, formats, and bibliographic listings for Rachman’s works.)
Penguin Books UK listing for War Is Interested in You. (Release date, promotional framing, endorsements.)
Notes on Citation Use
All factual claims about the book’s publication details, promotional framing, and Rachman’s biography are grounded in the search results above.
Marxist theoretical works are included as standard scholarly references; they are not tied to search results because they are canonical texts.
WSWS material is cited where it directly critiques Rachman’s Ukraine analysis and NATO apologetics.
· Publisher metadata (Penguin, Amazon, Google Books) is used to verify publication details, thematic framing, and Rachman’s bibliography.
Pip: A novel set in Taipei gets reviewed for its "sensory richness" and "heritage" — and somewhere in Taipei, a working class with rather more pressing concerns carries on regardless.
Mara: That tension between personal emotional framing and social-historical reality is exactly what freerein61 works through today, across a piece on R.F. Kuang's novel and the Marxist aesthetic tradition it helps illuminate.
Pip: Let's start with the novel itself — and the class position hiding inside the word "belonging."
Alienation as Class Position: Taipei Story and Diaspora Literature
Mara: The central argument here is that Lily Chen's cultural dislocation in Taipei Story is not a psychological condition but a structural one — the product of a specific class position, not a deficit of sincerity or vocabulary.
Pip: And the post names that class precisely. The "heritage speaker" celebrated in contemporary publishing comes from the professional-technical petty bourgeoisie — the wave of migrants from China and Taiwan who entered elite American institutions through the global labour reshuffle of the 1970s onward.
Mara: The post puts it directly: "Their 'heritage' comprises consumable symbols like cuisine, festivals, and a few hundred characters, since their social existence isn't rooted in any national community but is shaped by the international division of labour."
Pip: So the quest for fluency, authenticity, introspection — none of it can close a gap that isn't linguistic in origin.
Mara: Right. And this shapes what the novel can and cannot see. Taipei is rendered as backdrop and mirror — reflecting Lily's anxieties rather than presenting a society with its own history, contradictions, and class struggles. The post notes the city's humidity, street food, and bookstores are all there, but the structural forces are absent.
Pip: Taiwan as emotional wallpaper, while the actual Taiwan sits at the sharpest edge of great-power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific — that's quite an omission.
Mara: The post is explicit that this isn't a technical flaw. The novel "cannot ask the questions needed to understand its own material" because doing so would require acknowledging the class position that simultaneously causes Lily's discomfort and underwrites her security.
Mara: The post also draws on Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky to name what's missing aesthetically. Voronsky's core claim — that art is "the cognition of life" — stands against both formalist fetishisation of technique and the identity-politics policing visible in controversies like American Dirt, where a novel's substance gets displaced by demands that the author perform the correct identity role.
Pip: The Israeli pianist subplot gets exactly that treatment here — a minor character inflated by social-media accounting that has, as the post puts it, little to do with genuine literature.
Mara: The conclusion follows from all of this: alienation is a social relationship, not a personal emotional state, and it can only be addressed by changing the social conditions that produce it. No amount of introspection closes that.
Pip: Which means the novel's sincerity is real — and structurally insufficient. Those two things can both be true.
Mara: And that distinction — emotion versus understanding — is what the Marxist critical tradition insists on keeping open.
Pip: What stays with me is the insistence that the most personal struggles only become legible through history — not as background, but as cause.
Mara: That's the thread connecting the aesthetic argument to the political one. Next time, more on where that thread leads.
R.F. Kuang’s Taipei Story has been received in the American literary press with familiar terms like “identity,” “belonging,” and “heritage.” Critics commend its “intimate” portrayal of a young woman’s efforts to reconnect with her “roots,” along with its “sensory richness” and frank exploration of linguistic insecurity. This kind of language is not only insufficient but also indicative of a broader issue: it mirrors a context where literature is viewed as private emotional management, and criticism becomes a tool for policing identity boundaries. Consequently, this framing obscures the core of artistic understanding: the social and historical forces that shape individual experience.
Examining Taipei Story reveals that the central conflict—Lily Chen’s feeling of cultural dislocation—is not a psychological issue but a class-related one. The so-called “heritage speaker,” often praised in modern publishing as authentic, actually comes from a specific social class: the professional and technical petty bourgeoisie that migrated from China and Taiwan starting in the 1970s. Their children, amid the global labour reshuffle, found places in elite American institutions. This class’s connection to culture is inherently fragmented because they lack a genuine link to a living collective tradition. Their “heritage” comprises consumable symbols like cuisine, festivals, and a few hundred characters, since their social existence isn’t rooted in any national community but is shaped by the international division of labour.
Lily’s sense of alienation isn’t due to a lack of sincerity or fluency. Instead, it reflects her position in a class that exists between national identities, as her true community is the global labour market, which provides no real identity—only a role. The novel’s effort to overcome this alienation through introspection is futile from the start. No amount of vocabulary or sensory detail can replace the absence of a shared social life.
This class position influences both the protagonist’s psychology and the novel’s portrayal of Taipei. The city is depicted as a backdrop and mirror, reflecting Lily’s anxieties rather than presenting a society with its own history, contradictions, and class struggles. While the novel captures humidity, street food, bookstores, and linguistic mishaps, it cannot structurally acknowledge the underlying forces that truly shape life in Taiwan.
Taiwan is more than just a site of “cultural confusion” or a layered history of Japanese colonisation, KMT dictatorship, and industrialisation. Currently, it stands as the most volatile flashpoint of great-power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. The Taiwanese working class faces the devastating effects of Washington’s militarisation efforts and Beijing’s nationalist pursuits. Their fate is dictated not by individual pursuits of “belonging,” but by the broader international class struggle. The WSWS has consistently maintained that workers in Taiwan and China share common interests against their ruling elites, and that the push toward war endangers workers everywhere. A novel that spends two hundred pages in Taipei without addressing these realities is not “apolitical”. Rather, it reveals a class whose position within the global order closes its eyes to understanding history.
The novel’s approach to culture mirrors this pattern. Kuang confuses the accumulation of sensory details with the core of a culture and interprets one young woman’s emotional awakening as a sufficient response to the upheavals that shaped her. This isn’t a flaw in technique but an expression of a layer that sees culture as a collection of fragments to be reassembled through introspection, because it lacks a unified cultural life. For a class engaged in a historical project, culture is a dynamic outcome of social labour and conflict. For the diaspora professional, however, it becomes a commodity for consumption.
The debate over the novel’s Israeli pianist, a minor character amplified by social-media identity policing, exemplifies the decline of literary discourse under identity politics. Like the American Dirt controversy, the work’s substance is overshadowed by expectations that the author fit a specific identity role. This superficial moral accounting has little to do with genuine literature and instead reflects a social layer that manipulates identity for political gain. Kuang’s novel does not exhibit cynicism towards identity; rather, it is confined within it.
The core issue is that the novel cannot ask the questions needed to understand its own material. It cannot explore why Lily feels alienated because doing so would require addressing the class position that causes both her discomfort and her sense of security. It cannot consider what might alleviate that alienation, because the honest answer is that nothing within its accepted framework—fluency, authenticity, self-knowledge—can fix it. Alienation is not merely a personal emotional issue but a social relationship. It can only be overcome by changing the social conditions that create it: a society where culture isn’t a commodity and belonging isn’t a credential.
Art as Cognition, Not Technique: Voronsky, Lenin, Trotsky
Literature’s goal is not to provide solutions but to clarify history and portray the individual as a crossroads of social forces. This echoes Voronsky’s view of art as “the cognition of life” and Trotsky’s critique of formalists who limit art to technique. Taipei Story is flawed not for showing emotion without insight, but for substituting emotion for understanding and mistaking that substitution for sincerity.
Aleksandr Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky opposed formalism not merely for aesthetic reasons but as a vital defence of the Marxist view of art. Their critique of formalism was rooted in the same intellectual debate that fuelled early Soviet discussions on culture: the idea that human and artistic consciousness are inherently linked to social being. They saw formalism as a retreat into technique, a petty-bourgeois effort to separate art from the social context that engenders it. In contrast, they believed art serves as a mode of cognition — a means to understand life in its dynamism, contradictions, and development.
In the 1920s, formalism was more than just focusing on form. It emphasised form over content, fetishised artistic techniques, and treated literature as an independent system. The Russian formalists—Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eichenbaum—saw literature as an autonomous structure ruled by internal rules. Their idea of ostranenie (“defamiliarisation”) regarded the artistic image as a technical tool meant to renew perception. The meaning of the work and its connection to social reality took a backseat or were considered unimportant. As a result, literature became a testing ground for devices rather than a way to understand life.
Voronsky quickly recognised that this was more than a methodological mistake—it was a philosophical error. His core idea — that art is the understanding of life — directly challenged formalism’s tendency to separate art from reality. For Voronsky, the artist does not create meaning using clever techniques; instead, they uncover meaning within the world. The artistic image is not merely a tool but a means of revealing life’s true structure. The writer’s role is to shed light on social contradictions and expose what is hidden. Because form helps make content understandable, it cannot be separated from it.
Voronsky’s realism was neither photographic nor naïve. He recognised that life’s truth isn’t always immediately apparent and that artistic imagination is essential to understand its deeper structure. However, this imagination should align with reality, not detach from it. In contrast, formalists viewed imagination as a mere technical tool for perception. Their work reflected the perspective of a petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that had become insecure about comprehending society as a unified whole. Overall, formalism signalled an ideological withdrawal.
Lenin’s opposition to “art for art’s sake” was based on the idea that artistic creation cannot be separated from material life. In his writings on Tolstoy and Gorky, he argued that literature must be understood within its historical context — not merely as propaganda but as a product of class relations and social change. Lenin did not require art to be didactic; instead, he believed that criticism should focus on the social origins of artistic work. To Lenin, formalism was a form of idealism, implying that consciousness can be examined independently of the social and material forces shaping it.
Lenin’s critique of Bogdanov’s idea of ‘proletarian culture’ offers valuable insight. Bogdanov argued that the working class should develop its own culture, distinct from bourgeois art traditions. Lenin, however, saw this as a misinterpretation of Marxism. He emphasised that the working class does not create culture from nothing; instead, it inherits humanity’s entire cultural heritage and transforms it through ongoing struggle. Formalism, similarly, misunderstood art by viewing it as an independent realm separate from history. Lenin maintained that art is an integral part of human consciousness development, shaped by the social contradictions society experiences.
Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution strengthened this critique by emphasising that while artistic freedom must be protected from bureaucratic control, art cannot be separated from the social forces behind it. He argued that formalism, which focuses solely on artistic techniques, mistakes superficial aspects for core meaning, neglecting the historical context that gives art its significance. Trotsky’s dialectical realism acknowledged the vital role of the artist’s imagination, but only as a means to uncover the underlying principles of life.
Trotsky’s critique of futurism is insightful. He appreciated the futurists’ dynamic energy and experimental spirit but criticised their efforts to break away from tradition. He believed art evolves through history and cannot be reshaped by edict alone. Their focus on novelty for novelty’s sake was a type of formalism, equating technical innovation with shifts in consciousness. Trotsky argued that true artistic progress comes from social transformations, not just experimenting with techniques.
The significance of this debate became evident as the Soviet bureaucracy tightened its control. Stalinist cultural policy, with its rigid adherence to “socialist realism,” exemplified a related distortion. While formalism disconnected art from reality by focusing on technique, Stalinism disconnected art by enforcing a bureaucratic version of “correct” content. Both approaches restricted artists from exploring life’s contradictions. Voronsky, Lenin, and Trotsky opposed both because they hindered art’s ability to understand and reflect reality.
Voronsky’s story highlights the political struggles involved. As the editor of Krasnaya Nov, he supported writers who aimed for honest depictions of life, even when their work revealed uncomfortable contradictions for the bureaucracy. Consequently, he was labelled a “Trotskyist” and “formalism sympathiser,” a gross mischaracterisation of his true stance. Voronsky was actually defending realism against both formalist abstraction and bureaucratic distortions. His execution in 1937 was part of the wider campaign to eradicate Marxist culture under Stalin.
Their opposition to formalism matters because it upheld the working class’s ability to understand their own reality. For them, art was not mere decoration but a form of truth. It exposed life’s dynamics, contradictions, and historical development. Formalism rejected this view by reducing art to technical skill and disconnecting it from the social forces that give it meaning.
Kuang’s novel reflects a deadlock similar to what the WSWS highlights in its review of Danzy Senna’s Coloured Television: writers who see flaws in the identity-industrial complex but struggle to critique it because they are part of it. While Kuang’s case differs in specifics, the core issue remains the same. Her novel is described as “sincere and slight,” capable of showing discomfort but not fully analysing or explaining it.[1]
Ultimately, Taipei Story’s shortcomings do not stem from a lack of detail or sincerity. Instead, it reflects a literary perspective that fails to recognise the societal forces behind its own dilemmas. The novel treats alienation as a personal emotional state tied to a social class that experiences it privately—more as discomfort than contradiction. However, alienation is fundamentally a social relationship, rooted in a class position caught between national identities and primarily loyal to the global labour market that displaced it. No amount of fluency, authenticity, or introspection can fix this. Consequently, the novel’s quest for “belonging” is not only insufficient but structurally doomed.
Kuang’s story lacks the depiction of actual history: the movement of skilled workers, the reorganisation of two economies, Taiwan’s shift into a key battleground of great-power rivalry, and the trivialization of culture into consumable pieces for a class lacking a shared cultural experience. These are not mere background details; they are the core forces moulding the protagonist’s awareness. Overlooking these elements confuses the superficial symptoms with the true causes.
The key takeaway is not that Taipei Story should have been “more political,” nor that a better novel would have provided the missing context. Instead, the conclusion is that we can understand this social class’s alienation only from an external perspective—namely, the viewpoint of the international working class. This group experiences culture not as a commodity but as a living expression of collective labour. It has a historical mission to unite the fragmented existence typical of diaspora professionals.
Literature alone cannot eliminate alienation, but it can uncover its roots, clarify its framework, and direct attention beyond personal experience to the social factors that influence it. Taipei Story prioritises emotion over comprehension. Your analysis reestablishes understanding as essential for genuine engagement with feelings. This approach signifies the start of Marxist criticism: understanding life and recognising that even the most personal struggles are only understandable through the course of history.
Further Reading
I. Contemporary Reviews of Taipei Story
The Guardian – Kit Fan, “Taipei Story by Rebecca F. Kuang review – the torture and hilarity of learning Chinese” A detailed mainstream review emphasising the novel’s focus on language acquisition, Lily Chen’s insecurity about her “Chineseness,” and Kuang’s satirical approach to cultural identity.
Scroll. in – Pulari Meera Baskar, “‘Taipei Story’: Rebecca F Kuang grapples with anxieties of being estranged by and within language” Highlights the novel’s exploration of linguistic estrangement, diasporic identity, and the protagonist’s struggle to reconcile American and Chinese cultural belonging.
Asia Blooming – Valerie Wu, “‘Taipei Story’ Travels Around Language to Find Itself” Discusses Kuang’s attempt to move beyond conventional Asian‑American narratives of guilt and linguistic deficiency, while noting the novel’s emphasis on disorientation and failed fluency.
These three reviews provide the factual grounding for this critique of the novel’s thematic focus, its treatment of Taipei as backdrop, and its framing of alienation as a linguistic or emotional dilemma rather than a social one.
II. Contextual Sources on Taiwan, Diaspora, and Geopolitics
(These contextual elements are not directly covered in the review but are essential for the historical and political framing.
WSWS Coverage of Taiwan and US–China Tensions: Analyses of Taiwan as a flashpoint in great‑power conflict, the shared interests of Chinese and Taiwanese workers, and the dangers posed by US militarism in the Asia‑Pacific. (No direct search result returned in this query; included as contextual reference based on your established knowledge and WSWS’s consistent coverage.)
WSWS Review of American Dirt: Examination of identity‑politics policing in literary culture and the displacement of artistic content by demands for “authenticity.” (Contextual reference; not retrieved in this search.)
WSWS Review of Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Analysis of the impasse within the American literary milieu and the inability of certain writers to critique the identity‑industrial complex from within. (Contextual reference; not retrieved in this search.)
III. Marxist Aesthetic Theory (Voronsky, Lenin, Trotsky)
These works underpin the argument that literature must reveal the social forces shaping individual experience, and that formalism — whether technical or identity‑based — represents a retreat from history.
Aleksandr Voronsky – Art as the Cognition of Life: Foundational text asserting that art is a mode of knowing reality, not a technical exercise.
Leon Trotsky – Literature and Revolution: Defence of artistic freedom and dialectical realism; critique of formalism as the fetishisation of technique.
V.I. Lenin – Essays on Tolstoy, Gorky, and proletarian culture. Emphasises the historical roots of artistic production and rejects “art for art’s sake” idealism.
(These are standard Marxist sources; not retrieved in this search but essential to this theoretical framework.)
IV. Secondary Scholarship on Soviet Cultural Debates
Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia contextualises the debates between formalists, proletarian writers, and Marxist critics.
Katerina Clark – Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution provides historical background on the literary movements of the 1920s.
Viktor Shklovsky – Theory of Prose: Primary formalist text useful for contrasting with Voronsky’s realism.
(Contextual references; not retrieved in this search.)
V. Suggested Further Reading
Georg Lukács – The Meaning of Contemporary Realism: Parallel Marxist critique of modernist formalism.
Fredric Jameson – The Political Unconscious: Structuralist-Marxist account of literature as a socially symbolic act.
Terry Eagleton – Marxism and Literary Criticism: Concise introduction to Marxist aesthetics.
[1] Danzy Senna’s Coloured Television: Lacking the “pathos of distance”https:wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/31/wjcd-j31.html
