Sophie Scott-Brown’s article on Raphael Samuel is a thoughtful, well-researched contribution to understanding postwar British left intellectual culture. It benefits from careful critical analysis, especially from a Trotskyist perspective, as it uncovers not only the contradictions within Samuel’s project but also highlights the broader political trend of the British left during the second half of the twentieth century. This trend, as the essay suggests, is one of political withdrawal, often disguised by rhetoric around democratic education, cultural diversity, and the praise of “ordinary people” as key historical actors.[1]

Scott-Brown’s essay effectively emphasises several key points. She observes the theatrical and deliberately crafted nature of Samuel’s “people’s historian” persona—his “iron resolution” hidden behind a “deliberately dozy and slightly dotty front,” as Sheila Rowbotham noted. She also examines the contradictions between Samuel’s professed egalitarian ideals and his actual behaviours: for example, overriding Ruskin students’ choices on Workshop themes, staging the 1979 confrontation between E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Richard Johnson like a theatrical director, and employing charm and tactics where his theoretical authority was lacking. These insights are important corrections to the often romanticised views of Samuel’s legacy.

She correctly traces Samuel’s organising style back to the culture of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), highlighting the Popular Front approach of persuasion—prioritising “friendly persuasion over theoretical cudgelling.” However, the article stops short of extracting the essential political implications of this insight. From a Marxist and Trotskyist perspective, Samuel’s involvement with the CPGB isn’t just a biographical detail but rather the key political environment that shaped his entire intellectual path.

I. The CPGB Historians’ Group and the Popular Front Tradition

The Communist Party Historians’ Group, which educated Samuel alongside notable figures like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rodney Hilton, was deeply influenced by Stalinist politics. Ann Talbot noted that Hill’s “people’s history” approach, promoted by the CPGB, was more than just an academic tradition; it served as a political tool aligned with Popular Front ideology. This approach offered a democratic facade for a political stance that placed the working class under the control of the “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie and justified the international repression of revolutionary Marxists.

A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, the key work of the genre that Samuel inherited, intentionally downplayed the class aspects of historical struggles, blending them into a unified national-popular story. This nationalist skew was deliberate, driven by the CPGB’s focus on forming cross-class alliances. Even after Samuel left the Party in 1956, his “people’s history” continued to reflect this distortion.

Scott-Brown observes that many in Samuel’s generation left the CPGB following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. However, she does not mention that the most ideologically committed members joined the Trotskyist movement. Those who moved towards the New Left, including Samuel, retained the core political flaw of Stalinism: their rejection of an independent working-class political agenda in favour of a broad, pluralist, cross-class cultural movement.

II. Thompson, Althusser, and the Retreat from Marxism

Scott-Brown regards the clash between Thompson’s “socialist humanism” and the Althusserian structuralism of Hall and Johnson as the key theoretical controversy of that era. From a Trotskyist perspective, this debate was essentially a retreat from Marxism.

Thompson’s *Making of the English Working Class* is a truly brilliant work, but his idea of “socialist humanism” marked a retreat into empiricism, moralism, and eventually a nationalist view of working-class history. His polemic *The Poverty of Theory* argued for English empiricism against Continental theory, not scientific Marxism against idealism. Meanwhile, Althusserianism reduced class struggle to structuralist abstraction.

Samuel’s refusal to choose between these positions—his emphasis on “plurality”—was not a genuine compromise but a political dodge. The failure of Workshop 13 in 1979, as vividly detailed by Scott-Brown, was not just bad event management. It revealed the deeper incoherence of a political movement that had forsaken clear programmatic goals and sought to unify conflicting intellectual tendencies through organisational talent and personal charisma.

III. The Democratisation of History and Its Class Content

Samuel’s main initiative—the democratisation of historical practice—aims to empower “ordinary people” to produce their own histories, reflecting a genuine emancipatory goal. He believes that workers should understand their own history, as traditional ruling-class historiography often mystifies and subjugates them. Contributions such as the Ruskin College pamphlets on pit life, narratives from rail workers, and working-class club culture are important examples of this effort.

However, democratisation lacking political clarity risks becoming empty radicalism. Samuel’s idea of a “people’s historian” served more as a cultural stand-in for revolutionary political education. The key issue is not just whether workers can write their own history, but whether they can comprehend their role within capitalist society well enough to change it.

The traditional Samuel obstructed this understanding by reducing class analysis to a sort of ‘plurality’ and favouring cultural populism over political action. By the 1990s, as Scott-Brown observes, he had adapted more to the Thatcherite heritage industry than challenged it. The progression from the Ruskin pamphlets to ‘Theatres of Memory’ (1994) illustrates this shift. By that time, Samuel had moved from encouraging workers to investigate their own exploitation to praising popular historical entertainment—such as period dramas, country houses, and ‘retrochic’—as ways of creating history. Richard Hoggart’s comment that the book was created by a “traumatised Marxist” is harsh, but it holds some truth.

IV. Memory as a Substitute for Politics

Samuel’s shift to memory studies was more a political response than an intellectual breakthrough. When history is viewed as a cultural activity rather than a scientific analysis of class society, it becomes impossible to differentiate between progressive and reactionary historical views. If all “meaning-making about the past” holds equal validity, then miners’ oral histories and the National Trust’s curated nostalgia are seen as comparable.

This marks Samuel’s conception of pluralism: a theoretical approach where the working class and the bourgeoisie are seen as equal contributors to memory, rather than as opposing classes in conflict. The working class is viewed as a remembering subject, not just a resisting one. The past transforms into a space for identity formation rather than a field for critique. History turns into a theatrical stage rather than a purely scientific discipline.

V. The Limits of Cultural Democracy

Samuel’s approach to democratizing history increased participation but narrowed political perspectives. It made archives accessible but limited avenues for revolutionary ideas. While it amplified diverse voices, it also diminished the relevance of class. Workers can document their histories, yet if the framework is influenced by Popular Front nationalism or New Left culturalism, it results in self-expression confined to bourgeois ideology rather than fostering revolutionary consciousness.

The democratisation of history is significant only if it is connected to the political self-liberation of the working class, which demands a scientific grasp of capitalism, an internationalist outlook, and a revolutionary agenda. Samuel did not provide any of these elements.

VI. The Trotskyist Alternative: History as a Weapon

While Samuel’s tradition dissolves into cultural populism, the Trotskyist tradition emphasises the importance of the unity between historical knowledge and revolutionary practice. Trotskyism regards history as a science rather than a stage, considers the working class to be a revolutionary force rather than merely a cultural identity, and views the past not as a memory resource but as a strategic guide for overthrowing capitalism.

This is the response Samuel was unable to give when asked in 1979, “What is socialist history?” His reply—“it’s an awfully big question, Brian”—was not due to modesty but evasion. A truthful answer would have involved confronting the Stalinist tradition he inherited and recognising the need for an independent working-class political program.

Postscript: The Contemporary Stakes of Reassessing Raphael Samuel

A Trotskyist re-assessment of Raphael Samuel goes beyond mere antiquarian interests; it engages directly with current political and intellectual debates. The British left’s crisis in the late twentieth century—characterized by a retreat from class-based politics, an embrace of culturalism, and the shift from unified programs to pluralism—remains unresolved and has even intensified. The intellectual currents Samuel helped shape now dominate the humanities, while the working class continues to face systemic exclusion from political representation.

The modern academy, largely focused on cultural studies, memory, and identity-based histories, reflects the tendencies Samuel represented. The shift from class to culture, the prioritization of “voices” over analysis, and the celebration of diversity without political focus are now standard in historical research. Although seen as radical, these approaches serve as ideological compromises that allow a capitalist system to incorporate cultural criticism while suppressing conflicts over class.

Samuel’s legacy requires careful examination, not because of personal failings, but because his path illustrates a larger historical trend: the shift of the left from advocating revolutionary self-emancipation of workers to becoming a cultural and intellectual sphere focused on representation, identity, and memory. This shift has significant political implications. A left that neglects class struggle cannot challenge capitalism effectively. Similarly, a historical perspective that ignores class cannot reveal the true workings of exploitation. Without a clear program, politics cannot lead to genuine emancipation.

Today, Marxist historiography should focus on clarifying the structure of capitalist society and the role of the working class, rather than generating multiple narratives. It needs to reject the culturalist fragmentation legitimized by Samuel’s pluralism, reaffirm the scientific basis of historical materialism in opposition to the relativism of memory studies, and restore the connection between historical research and the political aim of socialist revolution.

This calls for a break not just from the Stalinist distortions of history but also from current culturalist distortions. It necessitates returning to the methodological clarity of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky—not treating them as icons, but as theorists of a dynamic movement. It requires a historiography that views the past not as a stage for memory but as a battleground of struggle, where their lessons are crucial for future battles.

Raphael Samuel’s work, despite its vibrancy and generosity, ultimately aligns with a political tradition that lacked clarity. His idea of a “people’s history” made the archive more accessible but stripped away the political conflict of class struggle. It highlighted the ingenuity of ordinary people but overlooked the deep structural forces influencing their lives. While it expanded the number of stories and fostered engagement with warmth and color, it lacked the theoretical tools necessary to challenge capitalism.

A Marxist revaluation of Samuel does not reject his dedication to ordinary people but instead reclaims the political scope that his tradition denied. The working class requires more than just a platform for remembrance; it needs a thorough understanding of history. It needs an actionable plan and a movement that can change society, not just analyse its history.

Only the revolutionary Marxist tradition, embodied by the International Committee of the Fourth International, provides this perspective. It uniquely maintains the continuity in the fight against Stalinism, nationalism, and the culturalist dissolution of class. Additionally, it asserts that history is not a collection of competing stories but a tool for a class poised to seize power.

Samuel’s critique is not meant as a closing but as an opening gesture. It extends beyond the cultural turn, the New Left, and the Popular Front, aiming to reaffirm a Marxist historiography suitable for the twenty-first century. The goal is not merely to democratize history but to equip the working class with the historical awareness essential for its emancipation.

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[1] Raphael Samuel and the Politics of the People’s Historian Sophie Scott-Brown-journal.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Socialist-History-61_Final-76-95.pdf

Pip: There's a genre of history that loves the underdog so much it forgets to ask why the underdog keeps losing — and freerein61 has written a long, serious essay about exactly that problem.

Mara: This episode covers one extended piece of Marxist historiography: a close critical reading of Raquel Varela's work on European history, measured against Zinn, Hobsbawm, and Trotsky.

Pip: Let's start with what "people's history" gets right, and what it structurally cannot see.

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A People's History Without Revolutionary Leadership?

Mara: The essay opens a debate inside the left-wing historical tradition itself — not whether to center the working class, but whether centering "the people" is actually the same thing, and whether that distinction has real political consequences.

Pip: The core charge is laid out early, and it's precise. The essay argues that "the concept of 'the people' is politically vague… it conflates the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and sections of the bourgeoisie itself."

Mara: So the upshot is that a category meant to be inclusive ends up dissolving the very class distinctions that explain why revolutions succeed or fail. Sympathy replaces analysis, and the reader is left inspired but not equipped.

Pip: The essay positions Varela against three reference points: Zinn, Hobsbawm, and Trotsky. Zinn gets credit for moral urgency but is faulted for treating all resistance as driven by a single impulse — victims and heroes rather than classes and parties.

Mara: Hobsbawm is handled differently. The essay acknowledges the structural depth of the Age of trilogy while noting that his Communist Party loyalty prevented him from analyzing Stalinist betrayals in Germany and Spain. Theory sound, politics compromised.

Pip: Trotsky is the yardstick. The essay identifies four methodological principles in his work: rigorous class differentiation, the centrality of revolutionary leadership, dialectical materialism, and internationalism. That last one matters — the argument is that you cannot understand the Russian Revolution without the German Revolution, cannot understand Spain without the Stalinist bureaucracy's global role.

Mara: The Portuguese Revolution of 1974 to 1975 is the essay's main test case. It argues that the Carnation Revolution was ultimately contained through the intervention of the Portuguese Communist Party and the Socialist Party, with the trade union bureaucracy as complicit. Varela describes the mass radicalization but, the essay contends, does not analyze the political mechanisms that stabilized capitalist rule.

Pip: Which is the structural flaw the essay keeps returning to: a history that chronicles uprisings without explaining their outcomes is a history that cannot teach the next generation what went wrong.

Mara: Part III widens this to the post-Soviet intellectual environment — the collapse of the USSR pushed the academic left toward cultural and identity frameworks, away from class analysis and the concept of revolutionary leadership. The essay reads Varela's theoretical gaps as a symptom of that broader retreat.

Pip: So the book is not dismissed — it's diagnosed. Valuable correction to bourgeois historiography, real sympathy for the oppressed, but short of what Marxist historical method actually demands.

Mara: The closing argument is that Varela's work should be read alongside Trotsky, Lenin, and the early Comintern — not as a replacement for that tradition, but as a starting point that needs the harder theoretical framework beside it.

Pip: History that inspires without equipping is, in the end, a comfort rather than a weapon.

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Mara: The question underneath all of this is whether the left's historiography is adequate to the political crises it's trying to address.

Pip: Moral urgency is not a substitute for a theory of defeat — and that gap, the essay argues, is not accidental. It's the next episode's problem too.

Raquel Varela, the Zinn Tradition, Hobsbawm’s Marxism, and the Trotskyist Conception of History

Part I

Raquel Varela’s A People’s History of Europe is a major contribution to modern left-wing historiography. It aims to blend the “history from below” perspective with a broad overview of Europe’s development from the Middle Ages to the present day. Varela’s writing is driven by a genuine commitment to workers, peasants, and oppressed groups, and it carries a moral urgency that sharply contrasts with the complacency and cynicism common in mainstream academic history. However, the strengths of her approach—such as its empathy for the exploited, focus on mass movements, and rejection of elite-focused stories—are closely linked to its weaknesses. These issues are not personal flaws but stem from the political and theoretical limits of the environment in which she operates, shaped by left-reformist, post-Trotskyist, and post-Stalinist currents that have influenced the European radical left since the 1990s.

This essay aims to analyse Varela’s approach by comparing it with that of three key figures: Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, and Leon Trotsky. Zinn embodies the populist moral story of resistance; Hobsbawm’s Marxism is scholarly yet politically compromised by the Communist Party; Trotsky advocates a scientific, dialectical, revolutionary approach that provides a clear explanation of major modern upheavals. Varela’s work exists where these traditions meet, drawing from each but mainly echoing the limitations of Zinn and Hobsbawm, while remaining somewhat distant from Trotsky’s method.

This analysis is more than an academic exercise; it involves high-stakes political issues. Addressing the crisis of global capitalism, the rise of imperialist wars, the growth of fascist movements, and the escalating struggles of the working class requires a historical perspective rooted in scientific socialism. While the ‘people’s history’ genre has its strengths, it falls short of this scope. It chronicles struggles but doesn’t analyse their outcomes, celebrates resistance but overlooks defeats, and invokes “the people” while hiding the crucial role of class leadership. The outcome is a history that is morally inspiring but lacks the necessary theoretical foundations—one that motivates but doesn’t equip.

Varela’s work aligns with the tradition set by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—a tradition with notable strengths and notable limitations. The book is praised for emphasising class struggle, general strikes, and revolutionary upheavals. Still, it is also criticised for theoretical ambiguity and political vagueness, especially around the concept of “the people.” The main flaw identified is that “the concept of ‘the people’ is politically vague… [it] conflates the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and sections of the bourgeoisie itself.” This issue is fundamental, as it underpins the book’s entire methodological approach. People’s History

The term “the people” is not rooted in Marxist theory but is instead a populist idea. It conceals the class conflict that shapes capitalist societies. This concept enables historians to praise acts of resistance without examining the underlying political goals, class makeup, or leadership of the movements. It replaces detailed, scientific analysis with moral outrage. Furthermore, it serves as a tool for the reformist left to avoid facing the key lesson of the 20th century: that the outcome of revolutions depends not on the vague notion of “the people,” but on the political leadership within the working class.

This is where a comparison with Zinn becomes necessary. Zinn’s “People’s History” is a passionate and compelling narrative that highlights the brutality of American capitalism and amplifies the voices of the oppressed. However, it does not offer a Marxist analysis. It fails to differentiate between proletarian, populist, petty-bourgeois radical, and bourgeois liberal movements, viewing all resistance as driven by a single moral impulse. Instead, it presents a history that focuses on victims and heroes rather than on class struggles or political parties. It chronicles injustice without analysing the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

Varela adopts this framework, viewing her “people” as united by oppressions rather than their roles in production relations. Her narrative emphasises sympathy over theoretical analysis, highlighting the struggles of workers, peasants, women, colonised peoples, and soldiers without exploring the class dynamics behind these conflicts. She lauds the mass movements of 1848, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Portuguese Revolution, but does not analyse the political leaderships that shaped their outcomes. Consequently, her history is detailed but lacks explanatory depth.

The difference with Hobsbawm is revealing. Eric Hobsbawm, a highly knowledgeable Marxist historian, authored the significant “Age of” trilogy, which is a major achievement. He comprehended capitalism’s structural dynamics, the long-term shifts in class relations, and the broader European development context. However, his work was influenced by his lifelong allegiance to the Communist Party, preventing him from addressing Stalinism’s crimes or the betrayals within the Communist International. Consequently, he couldn’t analyse the critical role of Stalinist leadership in the failures of the German and Spanish Revolutions and the post-war revolutionary surge. While his Marxist theory was profound, his political stance remained compromised.

Varela resembles Hobsbawm in her focus on long-term processes and her sympathy for labour movements. However, she lacks his depth in theory. She does not provide a systematic analysis of capitalist development, class formation, or revolutionary dynamics. Simultaneously, she echoes his political evasions by avoiding the role of Stalinism in 20th-century defeats, the betrayals within social democracy, the political limits of anarchism, and the essential issue of revolutionary leadership.

This is where Trotsky’s approach proves essential. His works—such as The History of the Russian Revolution (1905), The Revolution Betrayed, and his analyses of the German catastrophe and the Spanish Revolution—are the pinnacle of Marxist historiography. They go beyond simple event recounting, offering scientific analyses of society’s laws of development. These works are rooted in dialectical materialism, focusing on the contradictions between productive forces and relations of production, the global nature of class struggle, and the critical influence of political leadership.

Four principles define Trotsky’s method.

First, Trotsky’s class analysis does not categorise “the people” as a single analytical unit. Instead, he clearly distinguishes among classes and their political tendencies, analysing the proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, and state apparatus as separate social forces with distinct interests. Second, Trotsky emphasises the importance of leadership. He believes that the success of revolutions depends on the revolutionary party’s program, strategy, and organisation. While the working class may possess great energy and creativity, without revolutionary leadership, they cannot seize power.

Third, Trotsky advocates dialectical materialism, viewing revolutions as outcomes of capitalism’s contradictions. He explores the relationship between objective conditions and subjective factors, spontaneous struggle versus conscious leadership, and national developments in relation to the international context—fourth, internationalism. Trotsky rejects the national framework of bourgeois historiography. He analyses revolutions as part of a global process. He understands that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on the German Revolution, that the international crisis of capitalism shaped the Spanish Revolution, and that the defeats of the 20th century were the result of the betrayals of the Stalinist bureaucracy on a world scale.

This approach highlights the weaknesses in Varela’s method, especially evident in her analysis of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75. The document emphasises this event as the critical test of her historiography. It states that the revolution “was ultimately contained and betrayed through the intervention of the Portuguese Communist Party… and the Socialist Party, with the complicity of the trade union bureaucracy.” This analysis aligns with Trotskyist perspectives by recognising the revolutionary potential of the working class, the counter-revolutionary roles played by Stalinism and social democracy, and the absence of a revolutionary party capable of leading the power struggle.

Varela’s interpretation of the Carnation Revolution, however, highlights the spontaneity and creativity of the masses, while downplaying the roles of the PCP and SP in maintaining capitalism. She praises the radicalisation of workers and soldiers but refrains from discussing revolutionary leadership. She outlines the process without addressing its ultimate result. Her account depicts a struggle but lacks a comprehensive theory of revolution.

This is the main flaw of the “people’s history” genre. It collects evidence of exploitation and resistance but fails to analyse the dialectical laws governing historical progress. It notes the symptoms of capitalist crises without exploring their root causes. While it praises the courage of the oppressed, it does not account for their defeats. It refers to “the people” but does not analyse the class forces that influence history. Consequently, it presents a history of victims and heroes rather than of classes and political parties.

The outcome is a history that appeals morally but fails to offer political solutions. It evokes sympathy without guiding strategy. It stirs feelings of injustice without proposing specific plans for revolutionary change. This is a significant flaw— the core limitation of the reformist left. It explains why the left struggles to give a clear response to the crisis of global capitalism, why mass movements often lead nowhere, and why betrayals by social democracy and Stalinism have not been remembered as lessons. It also clarifies why the working class lacks a revolutionary leadership.

The purpose of Marxist historiography is to analyse the class struggle, not to celebrate “the people.” Its role is to explain resistance outcomes, not just record them. It aims to understand rather than moralise, and to empower rather than inspire. Varela’s book, despite its virtues, falls short of this standard. While it corrects bourgeois historiography by highlighting the working class, it does not fully explain the class’s historical role. It recounts revolutions but lacks analysis of the conditions needed for their success. Although it celebrates struggle, it does not investigate leadership. It documents the oppressed’s history but does not depict the class struggle in the Marxist sense.

Part II

Varela’s A People’s History of Europe reveals its methodological weaknesses mostly through its narrative structure. The book focuses on episodes of mass resistance—such as peasant uprisings, strikes, revolutions, and anti-colonial struggles—and shows genuine sympathy for the oppressed. However, its narrative is episodic rather than dialectical, jumping from one act of resistance to another without examining the underlying contradictions or the political forces influencing these movements. Consequently, it offers a detailed account but falls short in providing comprehensive explanations.

This episodic format mirrors the influence of the Zinn tradition. Zinn’s People’s History presents a series of moral tableaux: the dispossession of Native Americans, the exploitation of workers, women’s struggles, and African American resistance. Each chapter functions as an independent critique of injustice. However, the book lacks a systematic theory of American capitalism or a dialectical analysis of its evolution. It doesn’t explore the links between economic change and political institutions, class struggle and state power, or national and international development. Overall, it is a moral narrative rather than a scientific examination.

Varela’s approach follows this pattern by depicting the struggles of “the people” as heroic episodes. However, she does not explore the underlying structural dynamics of European capitalism, such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the bourgeois state, the development of the modern working class, or the emergence of imperialism as a global system. She also overlooks the contradictions within the capitalist mode of production and the connection between economic crises and political upheavals. While she describes the symptoms of capitalist development, she does not analyze its fundamental laws.

This lack of theoretical analysis is intentional, mirroring the current European left’s shift away from Marxist economic critique. The fall of the Soviet Union, the decline of social-democratic parties, and the emergence of post-Marxist ideas have led to a left that dismisses overarching narratives, questions class-based analysis, and resists the idea of revolutionary leadership. Consequently, the historiography focuses on resistance stories while sidestepping issues of power.

This avoidance is especially clear in Varela’s discussion of major 20th-century revolutions. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the German Revolution of 1918–23, the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39, and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75 are depicted as moments of popular mobilization, yet their underlying political dynamics are not analyzed. The contribution of the Bolshevik Party in guiding the Russian working class to power is recognized but not explored. The betrayals during the German Revolution by the Social Democratic Party are mentioned without analysis. The counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in Spain is acknowledged but left unexamined. The suppression of the Portuguese Revolution by the PCP and SP is described but not sufficiently clarified.

This is not about historical facts but about the method of studying history. The outcome of revolutions depends not on the “people” in general, but on the political leadership of the working class. Trotsky’s key contribution to history shows that whether revolutions succeed or fail relies on the working class’s ability to build a revolutionary party. This party must offer strategic guidance, resist reformist and centrist influences, and lead in the fight for state power. Without such a party, the spontaneous enthusiasm of the masses cannot be turned into an aware effort to achieve socialism.

This is the lesson that Varela’s work does not fully incorporate. Her narrative is rooted in sympathy for the oppressed, yet it lacks a comprehensive theory of revolutionary leadership. She highlights the courage and creativity of the masses but does not analyze the political forces shaping their struggles. While she celebrates the Paris Commune, she overlooks the absence of a revolutionary party capable of coordinating the effort. She praises the militancy of German workers but fails to examine the SPD’s role in disarming the revolution. She venerates the heroism of Spanish workers and peasants but does not address the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy in suppressing the revolution. Although she admires the radicalization of the Portuguese working class, she does not examine the political mechanisms through which the PCP and SP stabilised capitalist rule.

The outcome is a history that inspires morally but leaves politics confused. It elicits admiration for the oppressed’s struggles but fails to explain why those struggles were overcome. It creates a feeling of injustice without offering a clear strategy for change. While it presents a story of resistance, it does not provide a comprehensive theory of revolution.

The difference between Trotsky’s approach and others is clear. Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution” is not just a timeline of events but a scientific analysis of revolutionary dynamics. It explores how objective conditions and subjective factors interact, the balance between spontaneous struggle and conscious leadership, and the relationship between the masses and the party. The book examines the contradictions within the Provisional Government, the role of the Soviets, the emergence of dual power, and the strategic choices that led to the October insurrection. It serves as a work of historical materialism, focusing on the laws governing societal change.

Trotsky’s analyses of the German and Spanish revolutions are equally meticulous. He argued that the German Revolution’s defeat was due to betrayals by the SPD and the Communist Party’s mistakes, not an inevitable outcome. Similarly, he pointed out that Spain’s revolution was defeated not because of Franco’s strength, but because of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s counter-revolutionary policies. He examined the political forces involved in these struggles and the strategic choices that led to their outcomes.

This level of analysis is missing from Varela’s work. Her narrative is detailed yet lacks explanation. She depicts the struggles of the oppressed but fails to analyze the political forces influencing their destiny. While she celebrates resistance, she does not explore leadership. She provides a history of the people but not of the class struggle.

The impact of this methodological weakness is clear in her analysis of the Portuguese Revolution. The Carnation Revolution, a key post-war movement, saw the working class radicalize, workers’ commissions form, factories occupied, and the colonial empire collapse, leading to dual power and directly challenging state authority. However, this upheaval was ultimately controlled and stabilized through an alliance between the PCP, SP, the military, and the trade union bureaucracy.

Varela discusses the mass radicalization but overlooks the political mechanisms that limited the revolution. She fails to investigate the PCP’s role in subordinating the working class to the MFA, nor does she analyze the SP’s defense of capitalist property relations. Additionally, she does not address the lack of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to power. While describing the symptoms of the revolution, she neglects its underlying dynamics.

This issue is not about historical facts but about the approach to history. To understand the fate of the Portuguese Revolution, it is essential to examine the roles played by PCP and SP, the impacts of Stalinism and social democracy, and the lack of revolutionary leadership. These elements are crucial in shaping the revolution’s outcome. Without considering them, the history of the revolution remains unfinished.

Varela’s discussion of European capitalism’s history shows a similar flaw. She highlights the plight of the oppressed but fails to explore the structural forces shaping capitalist growth. She overlooks key transitions like feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the bourgeois state, the advent of imperialism, and the worldwide aspects of capitalist accumulation. While she details the symptoms of capitalist development, she neglects its underlying laws.

This lack of theoretical analysis mirrors the political stance of today’s European left. After the Soviet Union’s collapse and the decline of social-democratic parties, the left has become wary of overarching narratives, doubtful of class analysis, and opposed to revolutionary leadership. Consequently, historiography tends to praise resistance while sidestepping issues of power.

This is the main limitation of the “people’s history” genre: it documents struggles but lacks analysis of their results. It honors resistance but doesn’t address defeat. It refers to “the people” but downplays the key role of class leadership. It tells stories of victims and heroes rather than classes and parties. Marxist historiography aims not to celebrate “the people,” but to analyze class struggle. Its goal is not just to document resistance but to explain its outcomes. It seeks understanding over moralizing. Its purpose is not to inspire but to equip.

Varela’s book, despite its strengths, falls short of this standard. While it offers a valuable correction to bourgeois historiography, it does not significantly advance Marxist theory. It reaffirms the importance of the working class in history but fails to explain its historical role. The book recounts revolutions without analyzing the conditions necessary for their success. It celebrates struggles but does not focus on leadership. Although it chronicles the oppressed, it does not present a history of class struggle in the Marxist framework.

Part III

Varela’s historiographical approach reveals more limitations when viewed against the backdrop of the broader crisis in historical consciousness during the post-Soviet period. The fall of the USSR in 1991 was seen by the bourgeois intelligentsia as the “end of history,” marking the triumph of liberal capitalism and the ultimate overthrow of Marxism. This ideological shift significantly influenced the academic left, leading to a decline in class analysis, a shift towards cultural and identity-focused perspectives, and increased skepticism about the idea of revolution. The result was a historiography that emphasised fragmentation, contingency, and micro‑history at the expense of structural analysis and global processes.

Varela’s approach partially counters current trends by emphasizing the central role of class struggle, the significance of mass movements, and the agency of oppressed groups. She rejects both liberal historiography’s complacency and post-modernism’s fatalism, bringing the working class back to the heart of European history. These are notable accomplishments. However, her work is still influenced by the post-Soviet left’s intellectual environment. It lacks the confidence found in traditional Marxist theory, avoids discussing revolutionary leadership, and replaces the scientific concept of class with the moral notion of “the people.” While she celebrates resistance, she does not delve into the conditions necessary for achieving victory.

This tension appears in her portrayal of European development’s long trajectory. Varela highlights peasant resistance to feudal lords, artisans fighting guild restrictions, workers opposing capitalist exploitation, and colonized peoples resisting imperial rule. However, she stops short of analyzing the structural shifts behind these struggles. She does not explore the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the bourgeois state, the expansion of the global market, or the rise of imperialism as a worldwide system. While she notes the signs of historical change, she overlooks its fundamental mechanisms.

Her treatment of 19th-century history notably omits structural analysis. While she links the revolutions of 1848, the unification of Germany and Italy, industrial capitalism’s growth, the rise of the labour movement, and imperialism as interconnected events, she does not explore their deeper dynamics. Key contradictions of capitalist development—such as the struggle between productive forces and relations of production, the tendency of profit rates to decline, the expansion of the global market, and intensified class conflict—are left unexamined. Consequently, her narrative becomes rich in detail but lacks the necessary theoretical clarity.

The contrast with Hobsbawm highlights important differences. His series—*Age of Revolution*, *Age of Capital*, and *Age of Empire*—provide a broad analysis of key structural changes in the modern world. They explore the links between economic growth, political systems, and social movements, and analyze capitalism’s contradictions and imperialism’s forces. Hobsbawm’s work places European history within a global context, but it is also influenced by his loyalty to the Communist Party. This limits his ability to critique Stalinism’s role in 20th-century defeats, the Soviet state’s decline, or the betrayals within the Communist International.

Varela’s work lacks the theoretical depth of Hobsbawm but echoes his political evasions. She avoids addressing Stalinism’s role in the failures of the German and Spanish revolutions, does not analyze the Soviet state’s degeneration, and omits the betrayals within the Communist International. While she details the struggles of the oppressed, she fails to scrutinize the political forces influencing their outcomes. Her work presents a history of the people but does not explore the broader class struggle.

This is where Trotsky’s method proves essential. His analyses of the Russian, German, and Spanish revolutions reveal that revolutions’ outcomes depend not on the “people” in general, but on the political leadership within the working class. Trotsky illustrated that the Russian Revolution’s success hinged on the Bolshevik Party’s capacity to provide strategic guidance, resist reformist and centrist influences, and spearhead the fight for state power. He attributed the failure of the German Revolution to betrayals by the SPD and shortcomings of the Communist Party. Additionally, he examined the counter-revolutionary role played by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain. His analysis also covered the interplay between objective conditions and subjective factors, spontaneous action and conscious leadership, as well as national and international developments.

This level of analysis is missing from Varela’s work. Her narrative is motivated by sympathy for the oppressed, yet it lacks a theory of revolutionary leadership. She highlights the courage and creativity of the masses but does not analyze the political forces influencing their struggles. While she celebrates resistance, she does not delve into strategy. She provides a history of the people but fails to address the broader class struggle.

This methodological weakness becomes especially clear in her discussion of the 20th century. While she links events like the First World War, the Russian Revolution, fascism’s rise, the Second World War, the post-war settlement, the Cold War, and the fall of the Soviet Union as interconnected, she does not analyze the deeper factors driving these events. Issues such as imperialism’s contradictions, the crisis of the nation-state, the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy, and the global capitalist accumulation are left unexamined. Consequently, her narrative is detailed but lacks a solid theoretical foundation.

This lack of theoretical analysis mirrors the political stance of today’s European left. The fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of social-democratic parties have led to a left that distrusts grand narratives, doubts class analysis, and opposes the idea of revolutionary leadership. Consequently, historiography now emphasizes resistance but sidesteps issues of power.

This is the main limitation of the “people’s history” genre. It provides a record of struggles without analyzing their results. It honors resistance but doesn’t clarify why defeats happen. While it mentions ‘the people,’ it hides the crucial part played by class leadership. Essentially, it tells a story of victims and heroes, rather than focusing on classes and parties.

Marxist historiography’s purpose isn’t to praise “the people” but to analyze class struggle. It aims to explain resistance outcomes rather than just record them. Its goal isn’t moral judgment but understanding; not to inspire but to clarify. Varela’s book, despite its merits, doesn’t meet this standard. It offers a useful correction to bourgeois historiography but doesn’t significantly contribute to Marxist theory. While it restores the working class’s place in history, it doesn’t clarify their historical role. It describes revolutions but doesn’t analyze what conditions lead to their success. It celebrates struggle but overlooks leadership dynamics. It’s a history of the oppressed, not a history of class struggle in the Marxist sense.

The comparison with Zinn, Hobsbawm, and Trotsky highlights the strengths and weaknesses of Varela’s approach. Zinn provides a moral story of resistance but lacks in-depth theoretical analysis. Hobsbawm presents a structural view of capitalism but is politically biased due to his allegiance to the Communist Party. Trotsky offers a scientific perspective on revolutionary dynamics and emphasizes the importance of political leadership. Varela takes inspiration from Zinn and Hobsbawm, however, remains somewhat detached from Trotsky’s ideas. This distancing is intentional, reflecting the political stance of the modern European left, which has largely moved away from the Marxist critique of political economy and the idea of revolutionary leadership. Consequently, this historiography emphasizes resistance while sidestepping the issue of power.

The purpose of Marxist historiography is to surpass this restriction by analyzing capitalism’s structural dynamics, imperialism’s contradictions, the function of the state, class struggle movements, and the importance of political leadership. It should review past revolutions’ achievements and setbacks, recognize the betrayals by reformist and Stalinist leaders, and identify the conditions necessary for future struggles. The goal is to offer a scientific interpretation of history rather than a moralistic story.

Varela’s ‘A People’s History of Europe’ offers an important challenge to bourgeois historiography by re-centering the working class and questioning liberal narratives’ complacency. However, it is confined by the typical boundaries of the “people’s history’ genre, lacking the depth of historical materialism, the clear political stance of Trotskyism, and the comprehensive structural analysis found in Marxist historiography at its best.

Therefore, it is important to study Varela’s work together with the classical Marxist analyses by Trotsky, Lenin, and the early Comintern. These works offer the necessary theoretical framework to understand not only how and why workers fought and were defeated but also the lessons that can be learned for the future.

Pip: A seventeenth-century lens-grinder gets excommunicated for dangerous ideas, and four centuries later a Trotskyist historiography argues he was right about basically everything — welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mara: freerein61 has been digging into the long arc of materialist philosophy, tracing how Spinoza's monism connects to Marx, to Trotsky, and to the question of what revolutionary consciousness actually means.

Pip: Let's start with the lineage itself — Spinoza, materialism, and how one excommunicated philosopher ends up as the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.

Spinoza, Materialism, and the Revolutionary Lineage

Mara: The post opens with a provocation: that Spinoza has been celebrated precisely by stripping him of what made him threatening. Contemporary scholarship, even sympathetic scholarship, isolates him from the class antagonisms of his own century.

Pip: The post puts it directly — Spinoza's ideas were "dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today," because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.

Mara: That danger was biographical before it was philosophical. Spinoza's excommunication at twenty-three for "abominable heresies" wasn't theological squeamishness — it was a mercantile-rabbinic elite protecting its position inside the Dutch Republic's fragile tolerance. His material circumstances and his philosophy were inseparable.

Pip: And the post uses Trotsky's method of concrete analysis of concrete conditions to make that case — you cannot read Spinoza's intellectual defiance apart from the class forces that produced the Dutch Republic.

Mara: The philosophical hinge is his rejection of Cartesian dualism. Where Descartes split reality into mind and matter, Spinoza asserted one substance — Deus sive Natura — and his claim that "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things" anticipates Marx's insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions.

Pip: So monism isn't a metaphysical curiosity — it's the move that makes a scientific account of society possible at all.

Mara: The post traces this through the French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, d'Holbach absorbed Spinoza's monism and turned it into militant atheism. Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself." Engels simply said old Spinoza was quite right.

Pip: On freedom and necessity, the post draws a careful parallel: for Spinoza, freedom is not free will but the understanding of necessity; for Trotsky, that understanding becomes collective revolutionary praxis — the working class grasping the laws of history in order to transform them.

Mara: The post also does sharp ideological critique of Roger Scruton, whose conservative reading of Spinoza the post calls "the ideological antithesis of Spinoza's rationalism" — admiring the logical rigour while rejecting the egalitarian implications, turning a revolutionary into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation.

Pip: Domesticating Spinoza, the post argues, mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx — detaching revolutionary thought from its materialist foundations.

Mara: The conclusion is that Marxism doesn't supersede Spinoza but completes him: his monism becomes the ground of dialectical materialism, his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology, and his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers' democracy.

Pip: Four centuries on, the lens-grinder is still grinding.

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Mara: The thread running through all of this is the question of what it means to complete a thinker rather than merely inherit them.

Pip: Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx dissolved idealism; Trotsky dissolved fatalism. That's a relay race worth following — more next time.

I. Introduction: Spinoza and the Problem of Historical Materialism

Baruch Spinoza occupies a singular position in the history of philosophy: a thinker simultaneously canonised and neutralised. He is celebrated as a rationalist metaphysician, admired as a pioneer of secular modernity, and invoked as a precursor to democratic thought. Yet these recognitions have often come at the cost of stripping his work of its revolutionary implications. Contemporary scholarship, even when sympathetic, tends to isolate Spinoza from the social antagonisms of the seventeenth century and from the radical traditions that later drew upon his ideas. Spinoza’s ideas were “dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today,” precisely because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.

2.Spinoza’s Life as a Historical Symptom

Spinoza’s biography is not an incidental backdrop to his philosophy; it is a historical symptom of the contradictions of the Dutch Republic. Born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish community  a community of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition  Spinoza was excommunicated at twenty‑three for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” The severity of the cherem reveals the political anxieties of a mercantile‑rabbinic elite dependent on the Republic’s fragile tolerance. Spinoza’s ideas threatened not only theological orthodoxy but the ideological foundations of a commercial oligarchy.

His modest life as a lens‑grinder, his clandestine publications, and his sympathy for Jan de Witt’s republicanism all point to a thinker whose material circumstances were inseparable from his philosophical commitments. His attempt to denounce de Witt’s murder as “barbaric”  an act his landlord prevented for fear of reprisals  illustrates the political stakes of his thought. Spinoza’s biography thus becomes a site where intellectual history and class struggle intersect.

Leon Trotsky’s method of “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” is indispensable here. Spinoza’s intellectual defiance cannot be understood apart from the class forces that shaped the Dutch Republic: the rise of a commercial bourgeoisie, the crisis of feudal remnants, and the ideological vacuum created by the decline of scholasticism. Spinoza’s philosophy emerges not as an abstract system but as the rational expression of a world in transition.

3.Monism as the Ontological Ground of Materialism

Spinoza’s rejection of Cartesian dualism is the decisive philosophical rupture that makes modern materialism possible. Descartes’ division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa preserved the theological worldview of the seventeenth century. Spinoza demolished this architecture by asserting that there is only one substance “God or Nature (Deus sive Natura).” Thought and extension are attributes of the same substance; the mental and the physical are two expressions of one reality.

This monism is not a metaphysical curiosity but the ontological foundation of materialism. By dissolving the supernatural realm, Spinoza undermines the ideological authority of church and state. His claim that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” anticipates Marx’s insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions. Spinoza’s monism thus becomes the conceptual precondition for a scientific account of society.

Trotsky’s dialectical materialism deepens this insight. For Trotsky, the unity of mind and world is not merely ontological but historical: consciousness develops through labour, social relations, and class struggle. Spinoza’s monism provides the ontological ground; Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and dialectical method.

4.Consciousness, the Body, and the Anticipation of Marx

Steven Nadler’s argument is that consciousness corresponds to bodily complexity, citing Spinoza’s remark that “in proportion as a body is more capable… so its mind is more capable.” This insight dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before its formulation. Consciousness is not an immaterial substance but the mental expression of a body embedded in causal networks.

Marx radicalises this insight by adding the historical dimension. Consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body but of a body transformed by labour, tools, and social relations. When Marx writes that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being,” he completes the trajectory that begins with Spinoza’s monism. Spinoza provides the ontology; Marx provides the anthropology and the historical method.

Trotsky extends this further. In Problems of Everyday Life, he insists that consciousness is shaped by the rhythms of production, the organisation of labour, and the ideological apparatuses of class society. Spinoza’s insight into the embodied nature of consciousness becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a theory of revolutionary consciousness: the capacity of the working class to grasp the necessity of social transformation.

5.Spinoza and Trotsky on Necessity, Freedom, and Determinism

The question of necessity and freedom occupies a central place in both Spinoza’s philosophy and the Marxist tradition. Yet the conceptual architectures through which each thinker approaches the problem differ in form while converging in political and historical significance. Spinoza articulates a monistic determinism in which freedom consists in the adequate understanding of necessity; Trotsky, working within the framework of dialectical materialism, transforms this insight into a theory of revolutionary praxis in which freedom emerges through the conscious intervention of the working class into historically determined processes. The comparison reveals not only a deep structural affinity but also the way in which Marxism completes and historicises Spinoza’s project.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provides the conceptual framework for understanding Spinoza’s political significance. Spinoza’s democratic republicanism anticipates the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, but it also contains the seeds of a more radical egalitarianism that can only be realised through proletarian revolution. Spinoza’s critique of superstition becomes, in Marxist hands, a critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes a defence of workers’ democracy; his monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.

6 Spinoza: Freedom as the Understanding of Necessity

Spinoza’s determinism is absolute. Everything that exists follows from the nature of substance with the same necessity with which the properties of a triangle follow from its essence. Human beings, as finite modes, are no exception. Our actions, desires, and thoughts are determined by the causal order of nature; the experience of free will is an illusion born of ignorance of the causes that determine us. As the uploaded document notes, for Spinoza “freedom… is not free will but the understanding of necessity.”

This conception of freedom is not merely metaphysical but ethical and political. To understand necessity is to liberate oneself from the bondage of passive affects, superstition, and ideological mystification. Spinoza’s critique of religious authority rests on this insight: superstition thrives where causal understanding is absent. Freedom, therefore, is the achievement of adequate ideas — a rational comprehension of the causal order that governs both nature and society.

Yet Spinoza’s determinism is not fatalistic. The more we understand the causes that determine us, the more we participate in the activity of substance itself. Freedom is not the negation of necessity but its conscious appropriation. This is the conceptual core that Marx and Trotsky will later radicalise.

7. Trotsky: Freedom as Conscious, Collective Praxis

Trotsky inherits Spinoza’s insight that freedom is inseparable from necessity, but he transforms it by embedding it within a historical and social framework. For Trotsky, necessity is not the static causal order of nature but the dynamic, contradictory movement of history shaped by class struggle, technological development, and the global expansion of capitalism. Freedom emerges not through individual rational insight but through collective revolutionary praxis.

Trotsky’s critique of voluntarism and fatalism alike reflects this dialectical conception. Against voluntarism, he insists that revolutionary action must be grounded in an analysis of objective conditions; against fatalism, he argues that these conditions do not determine outcomes mechanically but open possibilities that can be realised only through conscious intervention. The working class becomes the agent through which necessity is transformed into freedom.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky writes that “freedom is the recognition of necessity — and the transformation of necessity into action.” This formulation echoes Spinoza but adds a crucial dimension: the transformation of necessity is a historical process, not a metaphysical one. Where Spinoza locates freedom in the intellect, Trotsky locates it in praxis.

8. Determinism Without Fatalism: A Shared Structure

Both Spinoza and Trotsky reject the notion of free will understood as uncaused choice. Both insist that human action is determined by causes that can be understood and acted upon. Both oppose superstition, mystification, and ideological obfuscation. Yet neither collapses determinism into fatalism.

For Spinoza, determinism is the condition of freedom: only in a universe governed by necessity can rational understanding liberate us from passive affects. For Trotsky, determinism is the condition of revolutionary agency: only in a world governed by historical laws can the working class intervene consciously to transform society.

The difference lies in the level of analysis. Spinoza’s determinism is ontological; Trotsky’s is historical. Spinoza’s freedom is intellectual; Trotsky’s is political. Spinoza’s subject is the rational individual; Trotsky’s is the revolutionary class.

Yet the structural affinity is unmistakable. Trotsky’s dialectical materialism can be read as the historical realisation of Spinoza’s monism: the unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the understanding of necessity becomes the transformation of necessity; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology.

9. Necessity and Freedom in Revolutionary Time

The most profound convergence between Spinoza and Trotsky lies in their shared rejection of contingency as the foundation of human action. For both thinkers, freedom is not the assertion of arbitrary will but the alignment of human activity with the causal structure of reality. In Spinoza, this alignment is achieved through adequate ideas; in Trotsky, through the scientific analysis of capitalism and the strategic organisation of the working class.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution exemplifies this synthesis. The revolution is not a voluntaristic leap but the unfolding of historical necessity — the contradictions of combined and uneven development — realised through conscious action. Spinoza’s dictum that “the more we understand, the more we are free” becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, “the more the working class understands the laws of history, the more it can transform them.”

10. Completing Spinoza: Marxism as the Historical Realisation of Monism

The comparison reveals that Marxism does not break with Spinoza but completes him. Spinoza provides the ontological foundation: the unity of mind and world, the determinism of nature, the critique of superstition. Marx and Trotsky provide the historical and political realisation: the unity of theory and practice, the determinism of history, the critique of ideology.

Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism; Trotsky dissolves fatalism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations; Trotsky grounds it in revolutionary praxis. Spinoza’s freedom is the understanding of necessity; Trotsky’s is the transformation of necessity.

In this sense, Trotsky is the most Spinozist of Marxists — not because he repeats Spinoza’s metaphysics, but because he realises its deepest implications in the sphere of history and revolution.

11 Politics, Ideology, and the Democratic Lineage

Spinoza’s political radicalism emerges directly from his metaphysics. If all humans are modes of the same substance, then no divine hierarchy can justify monarchy or clerical authority. His defence of democracy, equality, and secularism is not an ethical preference but a logical consequence of his ontology. His critique of superstition anticipates Marx’s analysis of ideology: both identify false consciousness as the mechanism through which domination is reproduced.

Jonathan Israel’s argument that Spinoza was the first major modern democrat is historiographically significant, but a Trotskyist analysis must go further. Spinoza’s political thought is not merely democratic; it is revolutionary. It articulates the emerging interests of a class whose ascent threatened the existing order. Ann Talbot’s claim that Spinoza was “as responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness” preceding the Enlightenment captures this dynamic.

12. The Line of Descent: Spinoza → French Materialism → Marxism

The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not retrospective but genealogical. The French materialists — La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach — absorbed Spinoza’s monism and transformed it into a militant atheism that confronted the ideological apparatus of absolutism. Plekhanov’s assertion that “present‑day materialism is a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself” captures this continuity. Engels’s remark — “Old Spinoza was quite right” — confirms that Marxism recognised Spinoza as a precursor.

This lineage is not a chain of influence but a sequence of determinate historical transformations. Spinoza’s nature becomes Marx’s social totality. Spinoza dissolves dualism; Marx dissolves idealism. Spinoza grounds equality in nature; Marx grounds it in social relations and class struggle.

Trotsky’s contribution is decisive here. He insists that materialism must be historical and dialectical, capable of analysing the contradictions of capitalism and the dynamics of revolution. Spinoza’s monism becomes, in Trotsky’s hands, a weapon against both idealism and mechanical materialism. The unity of mind and world becomes the unity of theory and practice; the critique of superstition becomes the critique of Stalinist mystification; the defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy against bureaucratic degeneration.

13. Scruton and the Conservative Neutralisation of Spinoza

The uploaded document’s contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton is a model of Trotskyist ideological critique. Scruton’s work represents the conservative attempt to reclaim Spinoza by stripping him of his revolutionary content. He admires Spinoza’s logical rigour but rejects the egalitarian implications of his monism. He transforms Spinoza into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation, a thinker whose metaphysics can be reconciled with hierarchy, tradition, and the “sacred.”

This is not an innocent misreading but an ideological operation. Scruton’s conservatism is “the ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.” Where Spinoza dissolves the sacred, Scruton elevates it; where Spinoza undermines hierarchy, Scruton defends it; where Spinoza insists that social reality can be understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Trotsky would recognise this immediately as the reactionary function of philosophy under conditions of capitalist crisis.

Scruton’s domestication of Spinoza mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx: both seek to neutralise revolutionary thought by detaching it from its historical and materialist foundations. A Trotskyist historiography exposes these operations and restores Spinoza to the revolutionary lineage from which he has been severed.

14. Conclusion: Spinoza in the Age of Global Capitalism

Spinoza’s revival reflects the exhaustion of postmodernism and the crisis of bourgeois philosophy. As the ideological coherence of neoliberalism collapses, the materialist tradition — from Spinoza to Marx to Trotsky — re‑emerges as the only framework capable of explaining consciousness, politics, and social transformation. Spinoza was a revolutionary in the Dutch Republic; his ideas remain revolutionary under global capitalism. Marxism does not supersede Spinoza but completes him.

Spinoza’s monism becomes the ontological ground of dialectical materialism; his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology; his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers’ democracy; his rationalism becomes the rationality of revolutionary praxis. In an era marked by deepening inequality, ideological disorientation, and the global crisis of capitalism, Spinoza’s rational, egalitarian, and naturalistic worldview offers not a relic of the past but a resource for the future. Only Marxism, as the dialectical completion of Spinoza’s project, can realise its emancipatory potential.

Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition opens this week with Spinoza — a seventeenth-century lens-grinder whose ideas were so dangerous they got him excommunicated, banned across Europe, and apparently are still causing trouble in the twenty-first century.

Mara: freerein61 has been busy — the posts this week range from Spinoza's materialist philosophy and its Marxist lineage, to the contradictions inside Hobsbawm's nationalism scholarship and the crimes of the British Empire, to Emily Brontë's social world, and finally to what Hofstadter's paranoid-style thesis actually does to working-class politics.

Pip: A full week. Let's start with the philosophy — Spinoza, materialism, and why Engels said the old man was quite right.

Spinoza, Materialism, And The Marxist Lineage

Mara: The post reviewing Steven Nadler's Spinoza, Atheist frames Spinoza as the foundation of philosophical materialism — the thinker who demolished Cartesian dualism by arguing there is only one substance, God or Nature, and that mind and body are two attributes of the same underlying reality.

Pip: Which means no immortal soul, no divine providence, no miracles — and a seventeenth-century excommunication that described his offenses as "abominable heresies and monstrous deeds" without actually specifying them, which is the institutional equivalent of being too scared to write it down.

Mara: Nadler's specific contribution is on consciousness. The post quotes directly from the Ethics: "In proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of perceiving many things at once."

Pip: So degrees of consciousness track degrees of bodily complexity — which the post argues anticipates embodied cognition and dissolves the hard problem centuries before Chalmers named it.

Mara: The post then traces the line forward: Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself," and when Engels was asked whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are attributes of one substance, he replied simply — "Of course. Old Spinoza was quite right." Marx adds the historical and social dimension Spinoza lacked.

Pip: The contrast with Roger Scruton ties it together — Scruton admired Spinoza's logic but wanted aesthetic consolation, not revolution. The post calls that a difference of class position, not temperament.

Mara: The post concludes that only Marxism can complete what Spinoza began, by grounding consciousness and freedom in the material conditions of social life. On to empire and nationalism — where the same question of class position shapes everything.

Hobsbawm, Empire, And The Limits Of Nationalist History

Mara: The post on Eric Hobsbawm's On Nationalism opens a sustained argument: Hobsbawm's scholarship on invented traditions and national identity is genuinely valuable, but his Stalinist political formation prevents him from drawing the revolutionary conclusion his own evidence demands.

Pip: He can show that Highland tartans and British coronation rituals were largely fabricated between 1870 and 1914 to manufacture deference — and then stay completely silent about Stalin constructing Great Russian nationalist mythology to consolidate the bureaucracy. That silence, the post argues, is not an oversight.

Mara: The post is direct about this: "the most disastrous 'invention of tradition' in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself — the doctrine of 'socialism in one country.'" Hobsbawm's framework can debunk bourgeois myths but cannot explain why nationalism persists once its constructed character is exposed, because he lacks a class theory of ideology rooted in material social relations.

Pip: David North's essay on Trotsky and Hobsbawm gets named here for targeting what the post calls Hobsbawm's fatalism — the reduction of history to what happened, which retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by insisting there was no alternative.

Mara: The Blood Never Dried, John Newsinger's people's history of the British Empire, runs into a related problem from a different angle. The post credits Newsinger with an unflinching chronicle — the slave trade, the 1857 Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Mau Mau camps — but argues his SWP background leads him to frame imperial crimes primarily as moral outrages rather than products of capitalism's structural logic.

Pip: The upshot being that moral outrage without class analysis slides naturally into decolonisation rhetoric and identity politics that leave the capitalist system intact.

Mara: The post closes by pointing workers toward Lenin's Imperialism and Trotsky's Permanent Revolution as the analytical tools Newsinger's framework cannot supply. Which connects directly to the next territory — what happens when inner life gets separated from those same social forces.

The Brontës, Class, And The Prison Of Victorian Society

Pip: The post on Deborah Lutz's new biography of Emily Brontë opens a question that runs through the whole piece: how did a clergyman's daughter, largely isolated on the Yorkshire moors, produce Wuthering Heights — and does a biography organised around objects and inner life actually answer that?

Mara: The post quotes Marx directly on Charlotte Brontë and her contemporaries — that they "painted the middle class as full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance" and revealed more political and social truths than all the professional politicians and moralists combined.

Pip: That's the benchmark the post applies to Lutz — and it finds her materialist instincts strongest in her earlier Paperwork essay, which connects Brontë's tiny, concealed handwriting to the cost of paper in the 1840s, rag shortages, and the paper tax not lifted until 1860.

Mara: The post values that work precisely because it grounds artistic practice in economic conditions. But it argues Lutz's thing theory and material culture framework stop short of asking why an exceptionally talented woman had to hide her inner life completely — and the answer the post gives is not personal eccentricity but the societal exclusion of women from public intellectual life in Victorian bourgeois society.

Pip: Emily's privacy was structural, not temperamental. The post extends this to the sisters collectively — the Brontës published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell because the alternative was dismissal.

Mara: The post also engages Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power as the most comprehensive Marxist reading of the Brontës to date, crediting his argument that Heathcliff's revenge is carried out entirely through property — mortgages, marriage alliances, inheritance schemes — while criticising his Althusserian framework for disconnecting the novels from actual historical class struggle.

Pip: And the SWP's treatment of the Brontës gets a sharp paragraph — reducing three of Victorian England's most complex writers to proto-feminist symbols for identity politics, the post says, diminishes both their legacy and the interests of the working class.

Mara: The post's conclusion is that Wuthering Heights endures because it is, as Paul Bond's review of the Fennell adaptation is quoted as saying, "visceral and astonishing… rooted not just in a brutal landscape, but in a real world of class distinction and savagery that must find reflection in the passions of our daily lives." That framework carries directly into the final segment — what happens when political analysis loses its class grounding entirely.

Hofstadter And The Paranoid Style As Liberal Weapon

Mara: The post on Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics opens by granting the essay a limited concession — it correctly identifies a recurring pattern of conspiratorial politics across American history — and then argues that the framework's real function is to pathologise working-class discontent rather than explain it.

Pip: Labelling millions of people's distrust of institutions a psychiatric disorder is a tidy way to avoid asking why those institutions failed them.

Mara: The post quotes David North directly on Trump's trajectory: "More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues."

Pip: So the anger is legitimate — the analysis of who is responsible is wrong. That distinction is the whole argument, and Hofstadter's framework collapses it by treating the anger itself as the pathology.

Mara: The post connects this to David North's lecture on the long shadow of history — Hofstadter's shift from The American Political Tradition, written from a genuinely critical standpoint, to the consensus school, which removed class conflict as a meaningful analytical category. The post argues that move served Cold War liberalism's need to delegitimise both McCarthyism and socialist politics simultaneously.

Pip: The revival of Hofstadter in the Trump era gets the sharpest treatment — the post argues it allowed the Democratic Party and liberal establishment to avoid accountability for deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, and the 2008 collapse by converting a political and economic crisis into a cultural one.

Mara: The post's answer is not a return to the liberal centre but the construction of a revolutionary socialist party — the same conclusion that runs through the Hobsbawm and Newsinger posts, and back to Spinoza's insistence that understanding causes is the only path to freedom.

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Pip: What ties the week together is a single question asked four different ways — what does it cost an analysis when it stops at the symptom and refuses the structural cause?

Mara: Spinoza dissolved dualism, Brontë exposed class brutality, and the posts keep returning to the same gap — the political vacuum that fills with paranoia, nationalism, or myth when the working class has no organised alternative.

Pip: More from A Trumpet of Sedition next time.