Science does not reach its goal in the hermetically sealed study of the scholar, but in flesh-and-blood society. All the interests and passions that rend society asunder, exert their influence on the development of science, especially of political economy, the science of wealth and poverty.

Leon Trotsky- Marxism in Our Time

We know that it has been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by those who have Factories how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand, as they used to do.  The Poor house we find full of great lurking Boys….  I am informed by many that there will be a Revolution and that there is in Yorkshire about 30 thousand in a Correspondent Society….  The burning of Factories or setting fire to the property of People we know is not right, but Starvation forces Nature to do that which it would not.

A letter from “A Soldier Returned to his Wife and weeping Orphans” to a Member of Parliament from Wiltshire (1802)

“But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress… nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses…”

Lord Byron-Song for the Luddites 1816

“[The Luddites] contained within them a shadowy image… of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs.”

E.P Thompson

Recently, several articles have explored the emergence of a “neo-Luddite anti-AI backlash.” One notable example is “The New Luddite Movement,” which was recently published in the Financial Times, a prominent newspaper serving Britain’s financial elite.

Camilla Cavendish, the author of the latest article, is a senior columnist at the Financial Times and a former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under David Cameron. She comes from the liberal-technocratic wing of the British establishment, a perspective focused on improving capitalism rather than replacing it. When a figure like Cavendish advocates for “new Luddism,” a reader must first consider: which class interests does this perspective promote?

The Financial Times, along with the New York Times and other outlets representing the liberal bourgeoisie, has increasingly published sympathetic articles attacking anti-AI and anti-technology sentiments, portraying them as a progressive social response to capitalism’s technological progress. It’s important to recognise what the Financial Times truly represents, as it serves as the official publication for global financial capital, representing the interests of the City of London and Wall Street. When it features sympathetic profiles of “new Luddism,” it does not express solidarity with workers. Instead, it channels genuine working-class frustration into politically harmless outlets, ideological dead ends that do not threaten the system. The FT will never ask: who owns these AI systems? That is the one question it is inherently unable to address.

The Real Luddites vs the New Luddism

The early 19th-century Luddites were skilled textile workers who opposed not just technology, but the capitalist exploitation enabled by machinery that threatened their jobs. Engels and Marx saw them as an early form of working-class resistance, imperfect in method (such as machine-breaking) but sincerely rooted in class antagonism. The “new Luddism’ promoted by the FT represents a fundamentally different phenomenon: a middle-class ideological stance that confuses the tool with the social relations that determine how it is used.

The scale of this new capitalist pushback is remarkable; over 300,000 jobs were eliminated by American companies in just the first four months of 2026, with AI being the main cause for two consecutive months. Despite investing $145 billion in AI infrastructure, Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs. Oracle is reducing its workforce by up to 30,000 employees, including those who spent their last month training AI systems that eventually replaced them. The stock market responded positively to these developments. This goes beyond simple disruption; it appears more like a form of class warfare.

A consequence of this class struggle is the development of Socialism AI, which seeks to protect workers and serve as a tool against capitalism. Recently, it countered a bourgeois commentary in the New York Times, claiming that capitalism—rather than AI—is to blame for mass layoffs, healthcare denial, and wealth concentration among a few oligarchs.

The development of Socialism AI by the ICFI directly challenges the new Luddite viewpoint. Instead of rejecting AI, it is vital to harness the technology to serve the working class. David North and Evan Blake’s responses to critics of Socialism AI highlight this stance: the petty-bourgeois critic who calls AI a “bullshit machine” is not showing genuine scepticism but rather engaging in “romantic anti-capitalism that criticises  the current social order in a conservative and even reactionary way.” By avoiding engaging with complex productive forces, this stance unconsciously longs for a pre-technological era and results in ineffective abstention instead of action. Socialism AI is genuine, not a superficial trick. It represents a practical use of the same historical materialist method Marx used for the printing press, the telegraph, and other key technological advances: these tools only become liberating when the revolutionary class actively and knowingly adopts

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”- Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

‘Behind the peasant the revolutionary beginnings of the modern proletariat, already red flag in hand and with communism on its lips'”. Frederick Engels

“History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.” – Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“Heaven was to be sought in this life, not beyond, and it was, according to Muenzer, the task of the believers to establish Heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth”. Frederick Engels

Martin Empson is not simply an individual author who happens to have certain political views. He is an organic product of a specific political tendency, the British Socialist Workers Party, and everything he writes on history is shaped, consciously or not, by the theoretical and political framework that tendency has built up over decades. When Martin Empson writes history, whether about the German Peasant War, ecology and capitalism, or any other subject, he does so within this theoretical and political framework. Several specific distortions flow necessarily from it.

The German Peasant War is one of the most important pre-capitalist revolutionary upheavals in European history, and Marxists have always taken it seriously. Friedrich Engels himself wrote the foundational Marxist study, The Peasant War in Germany (1850), composed in the immediate aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848–49. That timing was no accident. Engels wrote it explicitly to draw historical lessons for the modern revolutionary movement from a great popular uprising that had been defeated.

The material roots of the uprising. The Peasant War was not simply a religious rebellion dressed in the language of scripture. It arose from the concrete, material oppression of the German peasantry and plebeian masses, feudal dues, enclosures, the consolidation of princely power, and the crisis of the old feudal order as early capitalist relations began to penetrate Germany. The Reformation provided the language and ideology of revolt, but the driving force was social and economic antagonism.

Thomas Müntzer is a revolutionary figure. Engels drew a sharp distinction between Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer. Luther represented the interests of the moderate bourgeoisie and the princes. He wanted religious reform but recoiled in horror from the social revolution of the masses. When the peasants rose, Luther called for their bloody suppression with his infamous tract Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. Müntzer, by contrast, represented the most radical plebeian wing of the movement. His theology was a revolutionary doctrine in religious disguise. The “Kingdom of God” he preached was, in essence, a demand for the abolition of class privilege and the establishment of a society of equals. Engels called him a “religious and political revolutionary of the first rank.”

The SWP and the German Peasant War: How History Serves Opportunism

The question of how the Socialist Workers Party relates to the German Peasant War is not simply an academic matter. It goes to the heart of what the SWP is as a political tendency, how it uses history, what lessons it draws (and refuses to draw), and whose class interests its politics ultimately serve. To understand this properly, we must first establish what a genuine Marxist history of the Peasant War looks like, then examine how the SWP’s theoretical and political framework systematically distorts it.

The SWP advocates for its core idea of “socialism from below’ as a return to genuine Marxism and opposes Stalinism. However, in practice, it appears to use this idea to dismiss revolutionary leadership. Empson views Müntzer and the peasants mainly as symbols of heroism and spontaneous radicalism but overlooks Engels’ key argument: Müntzer’s defeat resulted from the movement lacking the political and organisational conditions necessary to transform mass militancy into victory. The SWP struggles to accept this because recognising it would mean acknowledging the need for the Fourth International, which it has generally opposed.

Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489–1525) stands out as a significant and tragic figure in early revolutionary history. As a theologian and preacher who broke away from Luther’s Reformation on the left, Müntzer became the ideological and military leader of the most radical faction during the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, the largest mass uprising in Europe before the French Revolution. Engels offered a detailed, sympathetic, yet strictly materialist analysis of Müntzer in his influential work, The Peasant War in Germany (1850). Written shortly after the failed revolutions of 1848, Engels drew clear political lessons for the proletariat movement. To Engels, Müntzer was not just a religious eccentric but a true revolutionary; his theology was the only way to express a proto-communist agenda within the 16th-century context. Müntzer’s idea of the “Kingdom of God” fundamentally advocated for a society without class divisions, private property, or a ruling state authority.

What distinguished Müntzer was his radical departure from Luther. While Luther’s Reformation mainly aimed to transfer church wealth from Rome to German princes and create a new bourgeois-Protestant system, Müntzer supported the plebeians and peasants—those most marginalised and argued that the Reformation must genuinely transform real-world conditions. He called for the immediate realisation of the “Kingdom of God” on earth. Engels viewed this as the start of something truly new: a revolutionary who saw religious reform as potentially masking social reaction.

Engels also provided a stern Marxist critique of Müntzer, which serves as a key lesson. As outlined in Chapter 6 on the Peasant War in Thuringia, Müntzer’s tragedy highlights the common story of a revolutionary leader who guides a movement whose class base is too weak to support his proposed program. The greatest danger for a leader of an extreme faction is being forced to take control of a government when the movement is not yet ready for the dominance of the class he represents. Instead, he is forced to represent not his party or class, but the class for whom conditions are finally suitable for control.

This analysis highlights Engels at his most incisive, emphasising the limits of the class that imprisoned Müntzer and the peasantry, as well as the plebeian masses he led. As a fragmented, pre-capitalist, land-based class, the peasantry lacked the resources to bring about enduring revolutionary change. They could rise passionately but lacked the means to take control, reorganise production, or form a new state. Their views were mostly local, combining traditional communal values with aims for equality. During crises, the very forces Müntzer inspired failed to respond adequately. The Battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525 ended in a disastrous massacre; Müntzer was captured, tortured, and executed.

Engels drew a notable comparison to 1848, noting that the German bourgeoisie of his era had acted as traitors, like the princes and moderate reformers of 1525. For the proletariat, the message was straightforward. Unlike the peasantry, the modern working class has the potential to seize power and reshape society because it is a direct outcome of capitalist production. Consequently, the Marxist tradition regards Müntzer as an early figure, emphasising that his defeat was not accidental but rooted in systemic factors: revolutionary will, no matter how heroic, cannot replace a revolutionary class.

What connects Müntzer and the SWP?

Initially, they may appear entirely disconnected, a 16th-century millenarian theologian and a 20th-century socialist organisation. However, a common thread exists. Engels’ critique of Müntzer revealed a core issue: what occurs when a revolutionary leader or group promotes hopes beyond the existing class forces capable of advancing them? Müntzer reacted by pushing ahead with revolutionary zeal, replacing class analysis with religious conviction, a move that led to disastrous outcomes.

When the SWP and authors like Empson examine the German Peasant War through the lens of “socialism from below,” they often introduce consistent distortions: While the SWP tradition celebrates the heroism and radicalism of the peasant masses, it intentionally ignores Engels’ conclusion that their lack of proper class leadership and organisation led to their downfall. Although their heroism is authentic, heroism without a clear program, a leading class, or an international revolutionary organisation does not constitute true socialism from below. It remains a tragedy. The SWP focuses on the inspiring aspects of the uprising but neglects the critical lesson: the necessity of building a revolutionary party with a scientific program. This lesson reveals the SWP’s own longstanding hesitation to do so.

Engels’ prefaces from 1870 and 1874 place the German Peasant War within a global context of class struggle. He compares 1525 to key moments like 1789, 1848, and the rise of workers’ movements across Europe. The main lesson highlights internationalism: the working class can only succeed if united as an international movement. The SWP, which parted ways with the Fourth International in 1951 and has criticized Trotskyism for decades, fails to understand this lesson. Therefore, their history remains largely national and episodic, viewing each major uprising as an inspiring but isolated event without a unifying thread leading to revolutionary change. Engels clearly states that the German Peasant War introduced, in a rudimentary and confused way, the issue of state power. Müntzer’s program, expressed in theological terms, called for the overthrow of the existing social order and the creation of a new one.

The core issue is who controls state power. The SWP, following Tony Cliff’s rejection of the working class’s revolutionary role, lacks a true theory of socialist revolution and a plan for the working class to seize state power and dismantle the capitalist system of oppression. Their version of “socialism” is essentially pressure-group politics. In historical analysis, this approach reduces the question of state power to vague ideas of “people’s power” or “mass mobilisation” that often culminate in no concrete revolutionary plan.

Martin Empson’s book on the German Peasant War, for all the factual research it may contain, cannot be trusted as a work of Marxist history. The framework through which it interprets the facts is designed, consciously or not, to produce conclusions compatible with the SWP’s current political practice, which means conclusions that do not lead the reader toward the revolutionary programme. None of this suggests that Empson’s factual research is useless or that his book on the German Peasant War lacks valuable information. Engels, writing in 1850, emphasised that the historical record of the uprising was important and worth examining in detail.

However, the framework Empson uses to interpret that record is politically biased. The test is straightforward: does his analysis guide the reader toward Engels’s conclusions — that the failure of the Peasant War was due to a failure of class forces and revolutionary leadership, that moderate reformers were objectively counter-revolutionary, and that the modern working class needs an international revolutionary party to prevent a repeat of that tragedy? Or does it lead the reader to celebrate spontaneous mass struggle, implicitly supporting the SWP’s politics of pressure, popular frontism, and subservience to the Labour bureaucracy?

For a genuine Marxist history of this period, read Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany in its entirety, all three prefaces and all seven chapters. It is not long, and it remains, 175 years after it was written, the most penetrating analysis of that great uprising ever produced. No SWP book has improved upon it, and none can because improving upon it would require a political honesty that the SWP’s entire existence depends on avoiding.

Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition — named after a book about political theory and the rise of capitalism, which is either a perfect origin story or the most on-brand thing a website about class struggle could possibly do.

Mara: That's the site, and freerein61 is the author behind everything we're covering today — from the British Marxist historians and the 1926 General Strike, to Franco's Spain, social media as a capitalist machine, and the politics hiding inside football, fiction, and punk music.

Pip: Let's start with the tradition that shapes everything else — the Communist Party Historians Group and its complicated legacy.

The British Marxist Historians and Their Limits

Mara: The central question here is whether the British Marxist historians — figures like E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and Christopher Hill — produced genuinely revolutionary scholarship or whether their formation inside British Stalinism imposed limits they never overcame.

Pip: Harvey Kaye's survey of the group, The British Marxist Historians, is the anchor text, and it gets credit for showing what made them coherent as a tradition.

Mara: Kaye demonstrates that the Communist Party Historians Group, established in 1946, shared not just an organisation but, as the post puts it, "a common set of intellectual issues, methodological stances, and political motivations" that produced "a distinctive and impactful body of historical scholarship."

Pip: The upshot is that their collective challenge to Whig historiography — which treated class conflict as incidental rather than structural — was a real intellectual achievement, not just a party line dressed up as history.

Mara: But the critique goes deeper than Kaye allows. Ann Talbot's analysis of Christopher Hill is cited directly: the group developed their approach within a "People's History" that "obscured the class nature of earlier rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition."

Pip: Which is where the Popular Front framework does its quiet damage — turning internationalist class analysis into a usable national myth.

Mara: Hobsbawm is the sharpest case. David North's reply to him identifies what Hobsbawm himself admitted: that as a Communist Party member, he deliberately avoided writing about the Russian Revolution because "the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful."

Pip: A historian who self-censored on the central question of his own century. That's not a minor footnote — that's the argument.

Mara: The post on H.N. Brailsford's The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited by Christopher Hill, develops the same tension through a different lens — Brailsford's ethical socialist admiration for the Levellers ran up against his inability to analyse why Cromwell felt compelled to destroy them.

Mara: Ellen Meiksins Wood's A Trumpet of Sedition — the book this website is named after — is assessed as a genuine advance in materialist intellectual history, placing Hobbes, Locke, and More within the class conflicts produced by agrarian capitalism, while Geoff Andrews' Radicals and John Rees and Lyndsey German's A People's History of London are both read as inheriting the genre's nationalist and reformist distortions.

Pip: The General Strike post makes the stakes concrete: in 1926, the Comintern subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to the TUC's left wing rather than building independent revolutionary leadership — and the result was a crushing defeat whose lessons are still being evaded a century later.

Mara: That thread connects everything in this segment — the same Popular Front logic that shaped the historians also shaped the political response to the General Strike, and both Callum Cant and Matthew Lee's The Future in Our Past and the Andrews book are assessed as continuing that evasion today.

Pip: The tradition produced real scholarship and real distortions in the same breath — which is why the debate still matters when the AfD is Germany's second-largest party and trade unions are managing austerity rather than fighting it.

Mara: From the historians who shaped how the left reads the past, to the battles where that past was most violently contested — Spain, Germany, and the question of fascism.

Spain, Weimar, and the Fascist Question

Mara: The core tension in this segment is whether fascism is explained by national psychology, cultural drift, or the concrete political betrayals of the organised working class — and how that explanation shapes what you think can be done about it today.

Pip: Andy Durgan's The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution is the anchor text, published through Resistance Books, the International Socialist Tendency's own imprint — which is, as the post notes, itself a political statement.

Mara: Trotsky's 1940 assessment of the POUM is quoted directly: "the POUM, while criticising the old parties, subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. It participated in the 'People's' election bloc; entered the government, which liquidated workers' committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership."

Pip: So the charge isn't that the POUM was too radical — it's that it was a brake on a working class that was, in Trotsky's words, "far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership."

Mara: The post on Giles Tremlett's biography of Franco extends this argument. Tremlett works within what Adam Hochschild called the "Authorised Version" — democracy versus fascism — which, the post argues, systematically obscures the simultaneous revolution that the Popular Front and the Stalinist GPU actively suppressed.

Mara: Katja Hoyer's Weimar, on the German side, is assessed as a liberal rehabilitation project that emphasises the republic's cultural vitality while minimising the foundational betrayal — the SPD's violent suppression of the 1918 revolution and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Pip: And the Cultural Marxism Conspiracy book by A.J.A. Woods connects the Frankfurt School directly to this history — Horkheimer and Adorno's "critical theory" emerged from the ruins of those defeats, attributing fascism to mass psychology rather than to the class betrayals that actually produced it.

Mara: The post quotes David North's analysis of that move: the Frankfurt School's pessimism "tended to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis" — which is why its legacy runs straight into identity politics and away from revolutionary organisation.

Pip: Weimar, Spain, the Frankfurt School — three different geographies, one recurring mechanism: a leadership that feared the working class more than it feared the right.

Mara: Which brings the argument forward to the present — because the same mechanism operates on the terrain of media, attention, and culture.

Attention, Platforms, and the Limits of Critique

Mara: The question this segment addresses is whether the left's analysis of social media and digital capitalism actually points toward working-class power, or whether it stops short at cultural critique and individual reform.

Pip: Richard Seymour's The Twittering Machine is the anchor text — a book that, the post concedes, gets the diagnosis right and then fumbles the prescription.

Mara: The post credits Seymour with identifying that platforms "are not neutral public spaces; they are capitalist enterprises whose business model is the commodification of human attention and social interaction" — and that dopamine-loop dynamics are "deliberately engineered to maximise engagement at the cost of critical thought."

Pip: Right — and here's the thing: the book ends without a political direction. The implied solutions amount to asking users to be more reflective, which is roughly as effective as asking a factory to self-regulate its emissions.

Mara: The post is pointed about why: Seymour's analytical toolkit leans on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School critical theory rather than classical Marxism, which means the working class appears as a uniform mass of compulsive users rather than as a class whose attention and data are being expropriated by monopoly capital.

Pip: The documentary The Social Dilemma gets the same treatment — technically alarming, structurally toothless, because it discusses mental health and democratic threats "entirely apart from the massive economic and social crisis and the moves toward authoritarianism by the ruling elite."

Mara: The post on Chris Hayes's The Sirens' Call develops this further. Hayes is described as a media voice whose political function is to channel popular anger into "policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds of bourgeois democracy" — accurate enough to win credibility, constrained enough to leave capitalist property relations intact.

Pip: And R.F. Kuang's novel Katabasis gets brought in here as a literary counterpoint — the katabasis trope, the descent into the underworld, carries genuine class content when deployed honestly, from Dante mapping feudal contradictions to Zola's miners in Germinal, but the post asks whether Kuang's academic hellscape reaches that depth or stays at the level of individual psychology.

Mara: The thread across all three posts is that critique without a theory of the working class as the agent of transformation reproduces the problem it describes — which is exactly what the pseudo-left's social media presence does at scale.

Pip: From the platforms that commodify attention to the culture that either illuminates or aestheticises the class beneath it.

Music, Fiction, Football, and Class

Mara: The final segment asks how popular culture — music, literature, sport — either expresses class formations or obscures them, and what a materialist reading of those forms actually looks like.

Pip: Paul Weller's oral history Dancing Through the Fire is the anchor, and the post opens with A Town Called Malice as the analytical object — a song where the contradiction of form and content is, as the post puts it, "dialectically significant."

Mara: The post reads the song's upbeat Motown groove against its lyrics of deindustrial decline: "an uplifting groove can broaden appeal — embedding class grievances in popular culture — but can also aestheticise suffering, sedating political urgency."

Pip: So the Modfather is simultaneously a working-class cultural document and a case study in how structural brutality gets absorbed into something you can dance to. Which is either a limitation or a survival strategy, depending on how generous you're feeling.

Mara: Mieko Kawakami's Sisters in Yellow is read through the same lens — her portrayal of precarious labour in 1990s Tokyo, the fragmented shifts and casual work, is described as encoding "labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment," corresponding to the global growth of informal and platform work affecting over 2.1 billion workers worldwide.

Mara: Francesca Peacock's Pure Wit, on Margaret Cavendish, is assessed as a valuable recovery of a neglected seventeenth-century philosopher that nonetheless applies contemporary identity-political categories to a figure whose intellectual freedom was "inseparable from her class privilege" as an aristocratic Royalist — a paradox the post frames as a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself.

Pip: And Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow closes the segment — a book that, with the 2026 World Cup approaching, reads as both a lyrical celebration of the game and a social diagnosis of how "class relations, commerce and power shape football."

Mara: Galeano's own line captures it: "Football has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organised not for play but rather to impede it" — and the post argues that combining his humanist impressionism with historical-materialist analysis is what produces revolutionary clarity rather than nostalgia.

Pip: The fight to reclaim sport, fiction, music — the post is explicit that it has to be waged as part of the broader struggle, not as a cultural supplement to it.

Mara: What connects everything across these posts is a single recurring question: whether the left has the political tools to match the scale of the crisis, or whether it keeps reaching for frameworks — cultural, nationalist, reformist — that stop short of the answer.

Pip: The British Marxist historians, the Popular Front in Spain, the Frankfurt School's turn away from the working class, the pseudo-left's social media presence — different eras, same mechanism.

Mara: The next episode will be worth watching for how those threads develop — the crises aren't getting quieter.