Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]
R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]
Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.
I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.
As the great G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”
And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today’s world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]
While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is ‘too articulate’ a critique only reserved for female authors?”.
In defence of Kuang Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the ‘realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, and she deploys this (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that “allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.” However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit”[4]
Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.
“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience.”
Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer
“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.
Philip Roth
“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”
Philip Roth
“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”
David Walsh
When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement’s vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]
Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers’ “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.
Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.
As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]
Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]
Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.
Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”
It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book’s journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]
There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.
He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.
A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.
He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.
As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.
In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, “The Sexual Witch Hunt,” and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]
It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.
Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.
[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html
[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html
[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said … I’m not going to take this lying down”
‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
“A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children … for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create … a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of enslavers and enslaved people, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against ‘foul language’ is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.”
― Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life & Other Writings on Culture & Science
“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
Lost Boys by James Bloodworth is a journalist’s examination of the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.
It is not surprising that Bloodworth did not want to research and write this book. He replied to his editor, saying, “Why would I want to do that?”. He writes, “Today I feel a bit like a funeral director in the aftermath of a mass casualty event. I would have preferred things to have turned out differently, but considering they haven’t, I intend to put my knowledge to some practical use. Having spent so much time researching the manosphere – including interviewing and interacting with hundreds of men and spending months at a time embedded on a course which purportedly taught men how to become ‘high status alpha males’ – I feel as if I have something worthwhile to contribute.”[1]
Indeed, why should anyone want to associate and talk to a bunch of Nazi like scumbags who give two thousand pounds to learn how to hunt down woman and on some occasions rape them and then brag about their behaviour of social media.
The origins of this so-called pickup movement can be traced back to Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller, The Game. His book turned the art of seduction into a woman hunt, which sees women as nothing more than prey and being treated as such. The men within this movement have no comprehension of history but their attitude towards women would not look out of place in the Nazi Party of German fascism.
To his credit, Bloodworth exposes these trainee fascists. He reveals the close links between the manosphere and the far Right, including fascists like Donald Trump. Trump’s fascist partners in the While House who dismiss their enemies as “beta”. His vice-president, JD Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. As Bloodworth points out, the rise of the Anti-feminist backlash coincided with the growth of fascist forces worldwide, and it reminded him of Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which enjoyed a resurgence during the first Trump presidency. As Sinclair wrote, ” Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’ However, his political understanding of how and why these members of the lumpen proletariat and deranged petty bourgeois are cannon fodder for a fascist movement is limited.
Bloodworth’s new book was inspired by his watching of the Netflix series Adolescence. He writes, “It is a striking film that is masterfully shot and powerfully acted. It has also generated a worthwhile public conversation. Much of this conversation has been constructive; however, some of it has been animated by a desire to change the subject – to talk about anything but misogyny and the radicalisation of young men on the internet. I found Adolescence surreal to watch at times.”[2]
As Thomas Scripps writes in his review of the Netflix series, “The reality, as we have been shown, is that the problems are well beyond an individual family’s ability to resolve. Perhaps the most common expression throughout the series is “I don’t know”, or some variant, from kids and adults alike; they are buffeted and bewildered by forces beyond their grasp.
The role of smartphones, the Internet, and social media, in particular, is well-contextualised in this broader social landscape. It would be foolish to deny the role they play in creating an unprecedented level of exposure to peer pressures and corporate advertising, declared and undeclared, and in streamlining the passage of individuals damaged by these influences into darker waters. But the real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.”[3]
So far, the opposition to the rise of the “Manosphere has not come from working-class women, but has taken the form of the middle-class movement centred around the #MeToo movement, which is already eight years old. As the Marxist writer David Walsh wrote, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other significant social and political issues of the day.”[4]
One of the more outspoken and articulate critiques of the “Manosphere has come from the pen of the writer Amia Srinivasan. Her book The Right To sex,[5] while containing so worthwhile observations, it essentially promotes the #MeToo movement’s right to unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process.
Srinivasan is the darling of all the radical groups, who fall over themselves in promoting her idea of social justice. Her brand of modern-day feminism is dominated mainly by selfish, upper-middle-class champions of “women’s rights”. Srinivasan writes, “It’s essential in any radical political tradition. It’s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More’s Utopia, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what’s possible, as well as what’s delightful about human life, has to be central to a radical politics.
As Kate Randall points out, “ The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle, not in the rarified atmosphere of the corporate boardroom and Hollywood. As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Notes
James Bloodworth is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in numerous British newspapers, as well as in many US publications. His book Hired: Undercover in Low Wage Britain was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2019 and was selected as The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year in 2018. He has produced and presented documentaries for Channel 4 television and has appeared on many podcasts. He has a new book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, scheduled for release on June 5, 2025, the result of a five-year investigation into the subculture.
[1] Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[2] ‘Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/
[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html
[4] One year of the #MeToo movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html
[5] The Right to Sex: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022 Hardcover – 19 Aug. 2021-Bloomsbury
In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website.
This year, I hope to expand the website and add more history writers, as well as a few additional subject pages. The other aim is to produce two drafts of the books I have been working on for some time. A collection of essays on Raphael Samuel and to rewrite my degree dissertation on Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates.
Meetings
If any writer has a meeting or book launch coming up, please don’t hesitate to contact me to advertise it.
Book Launch – A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition-
Author James Crossley introduces his biography of the Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history.
Thursday, 26 June 2025 – 7:00 pm Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU
National Portrait Gallery The Fiery Spirits: John Rees 10 July 2025, 13.00-14.00
Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
George Orwell 1984
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Animal Farm
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell
In the most recent edition of The Orwell Society Journal, John Rodden wrote an article[1] defending George Orwell from a “Never Ending Siege”. According to Rodden, no day goes by without Orwell coming under sustained attack from both left and right writers or journalists.
In the first part of his article, under the heading The Hate Campaign: From Two Minutes to a Hundred Years Rodden examines one of the more recent and sustained attacks on Orwell from the poison pen of Naoise Dolan writing in the Financial Times[2]. The FT donated an inordinate amount of space for her to bemoan Orwell’s influence: She writes, “ George Orwell died in 1950, but he’s in the newspapers nearly every day. In the past few years alone, the British press has quoted him on whether Britain is an unserious country, whether book blurbs are degenerate and why a good British pub should be revolting.
Writers ask what he would have made of the end of British coal, and repeat his counsel on how to make the perfect cup of tea. They cite him on why English people love queueing, the importance of having hobbies, and why “cancel culture” is a poor substitute for free speech. They ask what he can teach us about Israel and Palestine, and when Britain will tire of its culture wars. One might just as well ask when Britain will tire of the obligatory Orwell reference.”
Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist, while I have nothing against novelists, it would appear that Dolan has not read too much Orwell or perhaps not understood what she has read. She would also appear to be weighed down by an extraordinarily large axe, looking for a place to grind it.
Rodden breaks his article down into seven parts. In the first part, he perhaps inaccurately states that Orwell “hated the Marxist Left”. A wildly inaccurate generic term if ever I saw one. It would be an understatement to say that Rodden is loose with his wording, something that Orwell hated. Just read his essay Politics and the English Language.
The “Marxist Left “ is a vague term meaning just about every radical group under the sun. Although in the end Rodden is forced to make the distinction between the Marxist Left, by which he means the Stalinist British Communist Party, who are the Far Left, Rodden does not elaborate. The term usually denotes radical groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who do not hate Orwell; in fact, one of its leading members is an expert on Orwell.[3]
The Stalinists, on the other hand, had good reason to hate Orwell, and for more than two minutes. Orwell, who called himself a democratic socialist, first came to prominence in the 1930s for the powerful social criticism of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. The Stalinists hated these two books. The general secretary of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, accused Orwell of “slumming it” and “bourgeois snobbery”.
He wrote, “If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. If on his return from Mandalay he had bought one or two penny pamphlets on socialism and the working-class movement, what fatal experiences he could have saved himself from, because one never gets to know the movement by slumming. I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the “smell” of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. Well, pardon me if I say at once, without any working-class snobbery, that it’s a lie.”[4]
However, what put the Stalinist noses severely out of joint was the publication of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. According to Fred Mazelis: “ When Homage to Catalonia was published, Orwell was virtually ostracised for this account of the Spanish Civil War, which laid bare the Stalinists’ treachery against the Spanish and international working class. The Stalinists and their supporters were enraged by the book’s exposure of their role in strangling a genuine revolutionary movement through the same bloody methods then being utilised inside the USSR. In the ensuing years, Orwell found it increasingly difficult to get his writings published.”[5]
In section two, Spain and the Communists, Betrayal of the Left, Homage to Catalonia 1938, Rodden ends the paragraph with the strange assertion that the Russian secret police spied on Orwell and may have targeted him for elimination. Given what we know about Orwell and his wife, it is pretty clear that if Orwell’s wife had not acted when she did, they would have both been murdered by the Stalinists in Spain.
Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. Orwell’s Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal Farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, “The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state”.[6]
Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refuted this slander, saying, “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…I was trying to say, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”
Although Homage to Catalonia was a devastating exposure of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinists, he was to some extent blinded by his bitter experiences with the pro-Stalinist intellectuals and the smug pro-Stalinist liberals. Although his analysis of these people was usually accurate, his method was largely a subjective one. He dismissed the historic significance of the Russian Revolution and saw nothing left to defend in this revolution.
Mazelis writes, “This finds expression in Animal Farm and especially in 1984. While there is much that is powerful in these books, Orwell’s outlook also made it possible for them to be used by the anti-communists. Stalinism itself, of course, bears the major responsibility for dragging the name of socialism through the mud.”[7]
Orwell certainly did not write 1984 to drag Socialism through the mud. Published in June 1949, it came out amid rising Cold War tensions. As Richard Mynick explains, “The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to Stalin’s USSR. Coming from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was deeply hostile to Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions…which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.…”), his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this distinction. His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked, and in the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself mainly to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist “democracies.”
Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four was no endorsement of the West. It posits only an unaccountable elite that rules in its interests and maintains power by taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It examines what’s operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to exploitative rule, without regard to the nominal form of economic organisation. Put a bit differently, the book considers the psycho-social machinery of unaccountable state power in general, regardless of whether it originates from a ruling bureaucracy or finance capital. It explores the general problem of maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society, which can be done only through some combination of repression and controlling the population’s consciousness.”[8]
In section six, The Anti Intellectual Brigade, Rodden examines E.P. Thompson’s attack on Orwell. Thompson criticised Orwell from the right, not the left; he compared Orwell to “a man who is raw all down one side and numb on the other. He is sensitive—sometimes obsessionally so—to the least insincerity upon his left, but the inhumanity of the right rarely provoked him to a paragraph of polemic.”
Thompson spent most of his academic career distancing himself from his former life inside the British Communist Party. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a type of “socialist humanism”. Thompson at an early age rejected the classical Marxism of Leon Trotsky; despite later breaking with Stalinism, it is clear that Thompson’s subsequent historical and political writings still retained ideological baggage from his Stalinist past.
As Rodden’s article shows the discussion over Orwell’s work and, more importantly, his opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the UK Socialist Equality Party, a member of the audience used Orwell’s book Animal Farm to conclude that revolutions have always been defeated. In his reply, Chris Marsden said that despite Orwell being a brilliant writer and an opponent of Stalinism, he nonetheless drew pessimistic conclusions from the victory of Stalinism in the former USSR.
One example of this confusion was his turning over some 35 of these names, a year before he died in 1950, to a secret government unit called the Information Research Department. This arm of the British Foreign Office had been set up to organise anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda. Marsden made the point that the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposition opposed Stalinism from the standpoint of Marxism and had faith in the working class overthrowing it. They worked under extraordinary political and physical pressure to provide a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, something Orwell could never have done.
[1] The Never Ending Siege-Orwell and the Left The Orwell Society-Journal no 25 spring 2025
[2] How George Orwell Became a Dead Metaphor-https:www.ft.com/content/83625fad-f101-4712-ba2b-483b87ef0e12
“There are lots of people with lots of money who’d like a trophy. But you then lose track of them and they disappear, until they pop up on the market again.”
Prof Jean Seaton
‘I hope I shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies, more I can’t say, owing to the censorship.’ –
George Orwell, May 1937
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others
Animal Farm-George Orwell
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds, any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.
1984
About 160 historically important George Orwell papers have been acquired by University College London. The Gollancz Papers, as they were known were at risk of being sold to the highest bidder at auction.
The papers contain Orwell’s correspondence, contracts and readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, dating from 1934 to 1937. The papers relate to four of his earliest published works – A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Inside the Whale . His analysis of the politics of 1930s Europe, shaped his world viewpoint. The newly acquired papers contain manuscript notebooks, personal papers and the first handwritten notes of some of Orwell’s most famous words and phrases, such as “Two Minutes Hate”, “Newspeak”, and “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”.
The collection acquired by UCL had originally belonged to Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, who founded one of the 20th century’s most important left-wing publishing houses. Publishing several of Orwell’s early novels. However he refused to publish three of Orwell’s major political books, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Gollancz was particularly hostile to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Gollancz thought Orwell was a Trotskyist and was hostile to Stalinism. Although no Trotskyist, Orwell was hostile to Stalinism. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an important written by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth.
“Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and for socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[1]
A spokesman for University College London (UCL) said the papers were “a valuable piece of Britain’s cultural heritage”. UCL already has the world’s most comprehensive research material relating to Orwell. The purchase by UCL was done with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries to stop the collection falling into the hands of a few money-grabbing collectors. Anger was also expressed at the condition of the papers, which had been “languishing in dozens of rusty, dusty filing cabinets”.
The Orwell papers were owned by the Orion Group, which was in turn owned by Hachette. Hachette had no interest in the cultural value of the papers. Their decision to sell to the highest bidder because they were closing down the warehouse where the papers were stored had been condemned as an act of “Cultural vandalism”. According to Rick Gekoski in his 2021 book, Guarded by Dragons, “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”[2]
How Orion came to get the papers was explained by Richard Young, who writes, “Gollancz continued as an independent publishing house even after the death of Victor Gollancz in 1967, under the guidance of his daughter Livia. In the late 1980s, however, the business was sold to new owners and went through several changes of ownership in the 1990s, ending up under the Orion Group. In 2012, Orion was faced with a problem, in that the archive of Gollancz was by then housed in a warehouse on the south coast, along with archives from several other publishing houses. The warehouse provider planned to close the facility in the coming years, and so faced with this, Orion took the opportunity to put the archive up for sale.
So, what exactly is a publishing house archive? Essentially, it consists of two main elements: so-called file or archive copies of the books published by the firm, and secondly, the correspondence or publishing files relating to each of the published works. Gekoski did his best to place the entire correspondence archive with an institution. Those tapped included the British Library, as well as Universities in the UK and the US. The price tag of 1 million pounds, which Orion was seeking, proved to be a stumbling block, however, and all negotiations to sell the archive (which included significant George Orwell correspondence) in its entirety fell through.[3]
The capitalist speculators of the Orion company stands in stark contrast to the “extraordinary generosity” of Orwell’s only son of Richard Blair, who with his own money purchased 50 letters to donate them to UCL’s Orwell Archive, to stop them being gobbled up by vampire collectors and according to him “Then they’re never seen again.
Orwell’s biographer D J Taylor concurred with Blair, saying, “This is a fantastic treasure trove from the point of view of Orwell and publishing history … Literary manuscripts have a terrible habit of disappearing”.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams
“move fast and break things”
Mark Zuckerberg
I must insist upon the masses, and their integrity as a whole. I have great faith in the masses. The noble character of mechanics and farmers—their curiosity, good temper, and open-handedness—the whole composite make. Significant alike in their apathy, and the promptness of their love—I know they are sublime. Before we despair we have to count them in—after we count them in we won’t despair.
Walt Whitman- Democracy
“ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”
WSWS Editorial Board Statement
To a certain extent, you can see why Meta, formerly Facebook would want to ban this book and gag the author from publicizing it. Both actions by Meta failed and backfired spectacularly as the book has sold in the millions.
Careless People is an interesting if limited expose of Facebook. An organization that has been called pretty accurately a ‘diabolical cult’. Wynn-William spent seven years at Facebook and her 400-page book is a pretty damning indictment. The first thing that strikes one about the leading players on Facebook is the stunning level of hypocrisy and duplicity. Williams cites Facebook’s number two Sheryl Kara Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
Sandberg casts herself as a feminist icon however the reality is a little different. Her advice to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – meaning that the mother should work herself to death just before the baby is born. As one reviewer said, “It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.” Wynn-Williams, among others, was also bizarrely invited by Sandberg to sleep in her bed presumably to have sexual relations.
Having said that before Sandberg treated her like a piece of crap Wynn-Williams exhibited a large degree of political naivety and outright fawning over Sandberg and Facebook in general writing “Until this moment, it had never occurred to me to see Sheryl as a celebrity or be awestruck by her… But now I can see how she’s sprinkling some of her stardust, whatever that magical quality is that she has that makes you forget to focus on the substance of the meeting at hand and instead wonder what it is she’s doing differently that makes her better than you.”[1]
The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness.” As a useful analogy for the “Careless People” at Facebook, it only takes one so far. While Zuckerberg and his cohorts were indeed amoral, stupid, reckless and devoid of any principles they were representatives of an oligarch that has now captured the White House in America and is launching attack after attack on the working class. Significant protests against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and escalating deportation operations have erupted across the United States. Student leader Momodou Taal has been targeted by the Trump administration who have tried to have him deported for speaking out against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
As Robert Reich correctly states “Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest person, has followed suit, allowing Facebook to emit lies, hate and bigotry in support of Trump’s lies, hate and bigotry. All three of these men were in the first row at Trump’s inauguration. They, and other billionaires, have now exposed themselves for what they are. They are the oligarchy. They continue to siphon off the wealth of the nation. They are supporting a tyrant who is promising them tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks that will make them even richer. They are destroying democracy so they won’t have to worry about “parasites” (as Musk calls people who depend on government assistance) demanding anything more from them. When billionaires take control of our communication channels, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for their billionaire babble”.[2]
Or to put it more precisely as a statement by WSWS Editorial Board does “ The character of the new Trump government marks a violent realignment of the state to correspond with the nature of capitalist society itself. The world’s richest individuals and corporations control resources on an unfathomable scale, with a growing number of centibillionaires whose personal wealth exceeds the GDP of the world’s 120 poorest nations. In the United States, the three wealthiest people now collectively control more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population combined”.[3]
This type of wealth is becoming increasingly incompatible with Walt Whitman’s beloved idea of Democracy. But this political and economic situation largely passes Wynn-Williams by. She is completely indifferent to the assault by Oligarch Zuckerberg’s Facebook on the Socialist movement. The orthodox Marxists of the WSWS.Org have faced the brunt of Facebook’s wrath and censorship. What is not mentioned in Wynn Williams’s book is that Facebook was and still is engaged in an escalating campaign of internet censorship targeting the socialist left. Entire Facebook pages were taken down, and individual accounts were permanently disabled, without any explanation given or recourse allowed.
Facebook began its systematic censorship of the WSWS.Org after the January 6th 2021 attempted coup by Trump and his supporters. As Kevin Reed points out “It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accounts—including the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the US—by Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy”[4]
Wynn Williams’s book is a well-written but somewhat limited insight into the lives of Facebook Oligarchs. For a far more precise and revolutionary insight into the rise of the oligarchs one should purchase a copy of the newly released book from Mehring books.com entitled The Election of Donald Trump: The insurrection of the oligarchy.
This is an important compilation of stories from unaccompanied Central American teenage refugees who risk death to cross the U.S.–Mexico border. Recounted in short vignettes readers learn about the harrowing journey and treatment meted out to young children seeking a better life for themselves and their family. Juan Pablo Villalobos’s introduction indicates that all these stories are true except when he wrote their story to protect some minors’ identities.
The book is aimed at a 12+ audience. It contains significant allusions to violence, including murder and sexual assault. Which unfortunately adds to the compelling nature of the stories. The book is presented in such a way that it works on many levels.
Most of the children are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Such is the massive scale of the problem that in 2016 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published a major report called Children on the Run: In one interview with 15-year-old Maritza, from El Salvador, she explained to researchers that “I’m here because I was threatened by the gang. One of them “liked” me. Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador, they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn’t safe for me to stay there, and that I should go to the U.S.”[1]
Juan Pablo Villalobos called this collection nonfiction because the stories were collected via first-person interviews. The book is based on a series of interviews Villalobos held did in 2016; The Other Side examines Central American migration through the stories of 10 children who made the murderous trip to the U.S. on their own.
Villalobos adds , my literary ambition, if I can admit to that, was to write a book that is about Central American immigration and the migration of unaccompanied minors, but these stories are happening all over the world — in Syria, in the north of Africa, in Europe — and it was my hope that the book should resonate beyond the specific moment and the American and Central American contexts.”
With the Fascist Trump in the White House, the situation will only get worse. Figures released recently by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that the United States has detained record numbers of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross its southwestern border. In the last few days, various US media have reported, that the Trump White House is imminently planning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as part of his administration’s ongoing criminal deportation operations.
[1] Children on the Run-www.unhcr.org/us/media/children-run-full-report
“His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than are those of any other man of his age. He was a mystery to no man who saw him and heard him. Though high in position, the humblest could approach him and feel at home in his presence. Though deep, he was transparent; though strong, he was gentle; though decided and pronounced in his convictions, he was tolerant towards those who differed from him and patient under reproaches. Even those who only knew him through his public utterances obtained a tolerably clear idea of his character and personality. The image of the man went out with his words, and those who read them knew him.”
Frederick Douglas
“one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good.”
Karl Marx
“Lincoln’s significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours:
In the January 2020 issue of The Critic, the politician, historian and writer Alan Sked wrote an article entitled Dishonest Abe. To eternal shame and damnation, Sked was given a space in the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) recent letters page to again attack Abraham Lincoln. Sked is a right-winger. He was a founding member of UKIP in 1993. He was formerly a member of the Anti-Federalist League and the “Brugge Group”, which regarded the decision of Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to sign up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 as a betrayal of her legacy. Sked is still a Conservative member.
Sked’s first paragraph in the Critic article sets the tone for the diatribe. He writes:
“Today, Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most popular president, and historians devote enormous efforts to ensuring that his reputation survives unscathed. Yet during his presidency, he was hated by millions, and in 1865, he was assassinated. Even before the Civil War, he was loathed by perhaps a majority of his fellow countrymen, and in the presidential election of 1860, 61 per cent of the electorate voted against him.”[1]
From its tone, it would appear that Sked would like to assassinate Lincoln again. Regardless of how many people voted for or liked him, Lincoln was hell-bent on saving the Union. Whether He wanted war or not Lincoln was driven by the logic of the bloody civil war to resort to revolutionary measures. As Niles Niemuth writes, “During the brutal struggle, Lincoln expressed the revolutionary-democratic aspirations that inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight and sacrifice their lives for a “new birth of freedom.”[2]
Sked further writes, “Rather than accept him as president, the South seceded from the Union. The Founding Fathers had indicated that secession was entirely legal. Lincoln should have taken the advice of the Supreme Court, but rather than that, he manipulated an attack on Fort Sumter to give him an excuse for war. Lincoln vetoed an attempted constitutional compromise and got his way by illegally organising a military invasion of Virginia. There, his troops were humiliated.”
This paragraph shows not only Sked’s revisionist credentials but is a fabrication of historical events. When the Union commanding officer, Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky, refused to turn the fort over to the Confederacy, the South laid siege to the small federal detachment, refusing to allow supplies. According to Tom Mackaman:
“That Fort Sumter should have been the trigger event for all of this was itself the outcome of an unpredicted chain of events. Located next to Charleston, the citadel of fire-eating, pro-slavery secessionism, Sumter was part of a constellation of lightly guarded federal bases and arsenals scattered across the South and the border states that had become the focal point of preparations for war. In the period before the war, secessionists concentrated on taking, by hook or crook, federal positions. This was the great hope of the South. Its cash crop agriculture was bound to the “workshop of the world,” British industrial capitalism. It did little manufacturing and could produce little of its war material.[3]
Towards the end of his article, and I could be wrong Sked makes the point that I believe no other historian has ever said. Aside from saying that Lincoln had no liking for blacks, he writes :
“The Civil War was fought between two deeply racist societies who differed only over the fate of slavery. After 12 years of Reconstruction following his death, the North and South agreed on a racist political system for the South, which by the end of the century became the Solid South governed by Jim Crow laws. Blacks only began to experience equality after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Lincoln’s role in their long journey to emancipation must be treated with great caution.[4]
It is difficult to find words that adequately express the sense of revulsion produced by the fabrication of history. Leon Trotsky once pointed out that lies about history are meant to conceal real social contradictions.
Sked’s lies are indirectly refuted by Niemuth, who points out, “ While not an open abolitionist, Lincoln’s political record before the Civil War was outstanding, and he had come to be seen years before 1860 as the leading spokesman of the antislavery forces in the United States. The southern slavocracy certainly understood what it meant when he won the presidency, responding to his rise to the White House with secession. To the extent that any individual in history can be credited with playing a decisive role in destroying slavery, it is undoubtedly Lincoln.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great Frederick Douglas, who said of Lincoln:
“Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war. But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.[5]
Note
In the past I would have sent a copy of this article to the TLS as a form of reply to Sked’s letter in the recent TLS. But as the TLS has never printed a letter or had an article from an orthodox Marxist I do not see the point.
“Oh Heaven, could you have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight! I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at”.
Charles Dickens
“[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
Karl Marx
“Dickens is a beloved figure, first of all, because of the deep sympathy in his novels for those mistreated and oppressed by official, respectable society, especially children. It is difficult to think of another writer who conveyed such sympathy in significant fiction, with the possible exception of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Dickens, of course, enjoyed the “advantage” of having suffered poverty and abuse as a child, including during his stint, at 12 years old, working ten-hour days at a blacking (boot polish) factory while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison.”
David Walsh
“ In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to, but the child is small, its world is small, and its rocking horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. ”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
I would be lying if I said I celebrate Christmas. It is a time to eat and relax and probably write, as this article written on Christmas day, testifies. I tend to observe Christmas, and one of my few traditions is to spend Christmas with Charles Dickens.
Specifically A Christmas Carol. First, I read the book for the first time this Christmas, and second, I listened to this excellent audiobook by Hugh Grant. Grant is a much-underrated actor, and this audiobook is superbly narrated.
Everyone knows the story inside out. First published as a novella by Chapman & Hall on Dec. 19 1843. Dickens was not the only social commentator at the time of writing a Christmas Carol. Karl Marx, a great admirer of Dickens, walked the same London streets for over 20 years. Marx, Engels and Dickens were horrified by and wrote about the squalor produced by the Industrial Revolution. Engel’s famous work captured the poverty and squalor in England.[1]
There is, of course, a world of difference between Marx, Engels and Dickens. However, you would not glean that from numerous radical organisations that want to claim Dickens as a radical socialist and champion of the working class. As the Stalinist Nick Matthews writes, “It would be nice to think, too, that Marx’s use of the metaphor of the spectre that begins The Communist Manifesto, “A spectre is haunting Europe…” so soon after those in A Christmas Carol, is more than coincidental.”[2]
This may well be correct, but the writer George Orwell understood Dicken’s class position much better. He wrote, “Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and despite his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a ‘popular’ writer, a champion of the ‘oppressed masses’. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed, but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.
It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the spokesman of ‘the poor’ without showing much awareness of who ‘the poor’ really are. To Chesterton, ‘the poor’ means small shopkeepers and servants. Sam Weller, he says, ‘is the great symbol in English literature of the populace peculiar to England’, and Sam Weller is a valet! The other point is that Dickens’s early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion: “The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, dirt, and life upon the straggling streets, and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc., etc.”[3]
While Vladimir Lenin hated Dickens, Marx liked him and wrote “ “[t]he present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”.
To close, as Paul Bond wrote, “ It is In the 154 years since the death of the author, none of the central contradictions of the existing social order have been resolved. The exploitation so vividly portrayed in Dickens’s works continues to be a feature of everyday life over vast swathes of the planet, from Africa to Asia and Latin America. Yet, even in those countries where grinding poverty was ameliorated in some measure through the struggles of the working class and the establishment of the welfare state introduced under the shadow of the Russian Revolution, there is a serious risk of a return to the Dickensian nightmare.”[4]
A Trumpet of Sedition 