“Checking social media is the new opening the fridge when you’re not hungry.”
— Matthew Kobach
“Vulgarity is too mild a word for what unfolded on the steps of the museum, since vulgarity implies a coarse vitality. The 2026 gala was a pageant of decay so far gone in self-parody that one struggled to know whether to laugh, vomit, or check out eBay for a working replica of Dr Guillotin’s invention.”[1]
David North
The Twittering Machine is a provocative and often insightful book, drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and political economy to argue that social media is not a neutral tool but a machine that reshapes minds.
Oliver Eagleton, in his review of the book, remarked that a “cadre of cyber-utopian theorists” was instrumental in reshaping subjectivity, attracting attention, and profiting from provoking outrage and anxiety. Eagleton commended the book, acknowledging Seymour as a significant voice. He emphasised that the book provides a critical analysis of social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook, and similar sites, concentrating on their role as catalysts of addiction and compulsive self-disclosure within the “social industry.”[2]
Eagleton is right to point out the genuine merits in parts of Seymour’s critique. He points out that the platforms are not neutral public spaces; they are capitalist enterprises whose business model is the commodification of human attention and social interaction. He is right that the dopamine-loop dynamics of “likes,” retweets, and algorithmic amplification are deliberately engineered to maximise engagement at the cost of critical thought. And he is right that the platforms have become instruments of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff has also analysed.[3]
The Pseudo Lefts and Social Media
However, the book’s limitations reflect Seymour’s own political limitations. Seymour is associated with the British pseudo-left, a product of the Socialist Workers Party milieu, who moved toward a kind of post-Marxist cultural politics after the SWP’s crisis. His analytical toolkit leans heavily on psychoanalysis (particularly Lacanian concepts) and Frankfurt School-inflected critical theory rather than on classical Marxism. This leads to some characteristic weaknesses:
Social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack have become dominant spaces where pseudo-left politics often replicates itself, for understandable reasons. The pseudo-left’s focus isn’t on comprehensive political education for workers or on forming a revolutionary party. Instead, it centres on gaining visibility, developing a brand, and wielding cultural influence within a specific segment of the educated upper-middle class. Social media is suited for this because it fosters outrage, identity-driven appeals, and viral controversies, all without requiring a solid theoretical or historical foundation. What looks like “left politics” online is largely a spectacle: hashtag campaigns, call-out culture, aesthetic radicalism, and the promotion of individual influencers as proxies for real political programs. The pseudo-left thrives here because it doesn’t need to organise workers; it only needs to attract followers who already share its class outlook.
The most critical point that liberal and pseudo-left critics of social media systematically miss is the class-directed character of censorship on these platforms. It is not random or neutral. The World Socialist Website (WSWS) was one of the first to document and expose the coordinated campaign by Google, Facebook, and Twitter to suppress left-wing, anti-war, and socialist content. The pseudo left’s response, “break up big tech,” regulate the platforms, and bring antitrust suits, is utterly inadequate. The problem is not that these monopolies are too big; it is that they are private property at all. A society that allows a single individual to own the communications infrastructure through which billions of people engage with public life has already surrendered democratic governance to the capitalist oligarchy.
The Oligarchs and Social Media
A significant flaw in the book is Seymour’s emphasis on sociological and psycho-cultural factors, which undermines a comprehensive class-based analysis. He mainly focuses on subjects, drives, libidinal investments, and the “social industry,” but neglects a thorough materialist critique of platforms as capitalist monopolies. This includes their ties to finance capital, involvement in state surveillance, and crucially, the class struggles of those who control or are harmed by them. The working class, with its unique interests and potential for revolutionary change, is barely discussed. Instead, “users” are portrayed as a uniform group of compulsive individuals, overlooking their exploitation—where their data and attention are appropriated by monopoly capital.
The connection between oligarchs and social media is a vital and complex issue at the core of current politics. This relationship is not accidental; it reflects a basic social truth: the most influential communications system in history is owned and controlled by a few billionaires, who leverage it as a tool for class domination.
In Seymour’s defence, he’s not the only one allowing social media oligarchs free rein. In The Social Dilemma (2020), Jeff Orlowski offers what some critics view as a brave exposé of the social media industry, including interviews with former employees and executives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other tech giants. It highlights significant concerns about how these platforms influence human psychology and negatively impact society.
However, the WSWS’s Joanne Laurier was heavily critical of the film, saying the “film proceeds to treat social media entirely apart from any discussion of economic life and trends, including the important issue of who owns the giant tech companies and which class interests they pursue. In the movie, the learned “experts” discuss issues such as mental health and threats to democracy entirely apart from the massive economic and social crisis and the moves toward authoritarianism by the ruling elite.
The movie insists that people need to self-censor on social media. If not, the state should step in, as its lead analyst, Harris (himself a millionaire), advocated at the Senate hearing. The real target of mass censorship implemented by the technology giants, on behalf of the state, is the left-wing political opposition, including workers’ use of social media to organise strikes and protests outside existing unions. Google, Facebook, Reddit, and other outlets have systematically targeted the WSWS. Having no social reforms to offer, the ruling elites see censorship and repression as the only means by which to prop up their rule. Consciously or not, the makers of The Social Dilemma offer their services in this endeavour.[4]
What Is to Be Done?
Seymour’s book concludes without suggesting a clear political direction. While criticizing the platforms, the implied solutions are limited to encouraging users to be more reflective or to acknowledge the platform’s underlying logic. It lacks any vision for engaging the working class politically, connecting to the fight for democratic oversight of communication tools, or advocating for the nationalization of platforms under workers’ management. This reflects the characteristic of the cultural-critical approach that has mostly overtaken socialist politics in pseudo-left groups: insightful critique but ultimately powerless.
In sum, The Twittering Machine is a culturally alert but politically limited book. It sees capitalism’s symptoms more clearly than it sees capitalism itself, and it has no perspective for the working class as the agent of social transformation. It is the kind of book that is intellectually stimulating for a certain layer of the educated middle class while leaving the working-class reader with no road forward.
[1] What is it about the Met fashion gala that leads one to think fondly of the guillotine?
[2] Mind Forged Manacles? New Left Review 120 Nov/Dec 2019.
[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”
Margaret Cavendish
“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”
Thomas Hobbes
“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”
Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature
The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock’s 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.
The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but “a complete break with the feudal past,” of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.
Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a “precursor” to Marxist dialectical materialism.
This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.
The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.
Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.
Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.
Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.
This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a “revolutionary”; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.
The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family’s wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.
As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.
Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn’t change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]
Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist “revolutionary”.
This approach reflects more the concerns of today’s upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish’s intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the “revolutionary” framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.
Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname “Mad Madge” for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish’s gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.
She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.
[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
“To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.
Antonio Gramsci
“The Revolution won’t happen with guns; it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”
Max Horkheimer
Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe the cause lies in the fact that, for the most part, when people write, they forget to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the full import and truth of what they are writing.
Rosa Luxemburg
As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S., Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.
C. L. R. James
The premise of Andrew Woods’ new book is that “Cultural Marxism” has been weaponised both in the past and in current political struggles. Right‑wing forces use it to explain social change as the work of intellectual conspiracies rather than class struggle.
The use of the term by right-wing and outright fascists is a reactionary falsification that treats social change (civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, critical race and gender studies) as the result of a coordinated, sinister plot by intellectuals, universities and cultural elites to “destroy” Western civilisation. This usage is politically motivated, ahistorical and often antisemitic in its modern forms.
The phrase, as treated in conspiracy literature and included in polemical works such as A. J. A. Woods’s book, is not an accurate description of Marxism as a scientific theory. It is a politicised and ahistorical label that collapses a range of very different intellectual currents into a single bogeyman, used to discredit working-class politics and divert attention from capitalism’s material contradictions.
“Cultural Marxism” circulates as a catch‑all conspiracy theory on the right: an alleged plot by the Frankfurt School and the Left to undermine Western civilisation, attack family values, and “replace” traditional culture. This is not an argument grounded in evidence or history; it is a political weapon. Woods is correct in drawing attention to the right-wing attack on Marxism, but what is more important is an orthodox Marxist understanding of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy, something that Woods is incapable of.
The Frankfurt School
The intellectual currents often lumped together as “cultural Marxism” had distinct social origins and political trajectories. The Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) developed in a period of catastrophic defeats for the European working class and the emergence of middle‑class strata.
Woods’ book devotes a significant amount of space to defending the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others. These anti-Marxists developed “critical theory” in the 1920s–50s to understand the collapse of mass working‑class revolutionary movements, the rise of fascism, and the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Their outlook was pessimistic and often abstract; it flowed from defeats of the international working class and the ideological disarray of the interwar period—not from any secret plan to subvert society.
As the Marxist David North explains, “The post-modernists and the adherents of the Frankfurt School advance an absurd politics not because their philosophy is absurd. Rather, the crass absurdities of their philosophy arise from their reactionary petty-bourgeois politics. One cannot understand either the Frankfurt School or postmodernism without recognising that the rejection of Marxism and the perspective of a socialist revolution based on the working class constitute the underlying political impulse behind their theories. Postmodernist theory arose quite specifically as a repudiation of Marxism and the perspective of proletarian revolution.
The foundational role of Jean-François Lyotard in its emergence is well known. He is the author of the sentence: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The “metanarratives” to be discarded were those that advanced the Marxist perspective of socialist revolution. Thus, what is known in academic circles as “postmodernism” would be more accurately defined as “academic post-Marxism.”[1]
North goes on to explain that the Frankfurt School did not represent the revolutionary Marxist tradition embodied in the Fourth International. Its diagnosis—cultural regression, the “self‑destruction of enlightenment”—tended to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis.
One of the hallmarks of the Frankfurt School was its opposition to the working class’s revolutionary capacity. Wood cites all manner of radicals in the 1960’s that attacked the Fourth International’s “heavy emphasis” on the political independence of the working class and its nature as a revolutionary agent for change.
One of the leading players amongst the radical fraternity who led the attack on the revolutionary nature of the working class was C. Wright Mills. His “Letter to the New Left”, written in 1960, is one of the founding documents of post-war petty-bourgeois radicalism. It is historically significant not for being correct, but for being symptomatic — it gave theoretical expression to a set of demoralizations and class prejudices that would define the New Left and, ultimately, the entire pseudo-left tradition that continues to mislead radical politics to this day.
The core of Mills’ letter is a direct attack on what he called the “labour metaphysic” — the Marxist insistence that the industrial working class is the central revolutionary force in modern society. Mills argued that this was a tired dogma, an outdated faith clinging to mid-19th-century conditions. In its place, he looked to intellectuals and students — the “cultural apparatus” — as the new agents of historical change.
He writes, “What I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to ‘the working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation.”[2]
Wright -Mill’s letter opened the floodgates for a slew of radicals to jump on the bandwagon. One such radical was Max Elbaum, whose Revolution in the Air memoir-cum-history of the “New Communist Movement” — the cluster of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and Third-Worldist formations that arose from the radicalisation of the 1960s in the United States.
Elbaum writes, “This book has been written partly to identify the markers on that slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance in hopes of better equipping a new generation to take a different path. But an equally important goal has been to call attention to how dedication to constructing a revolutionary apparatus can act as a potent positive force, unleashing individual creativity, building solidarity across socially imposed barriers, stimulating theoretical exploration, and strengthening activists’ commitment to peace and freedom.”[3]
While it was warmly received in pseudo-left circles as a rehabilitation of that era’s left wing, reading it from the standpoint of classical Marxism reveals it as a deeply misleading document — a celebration of precisely the political tendencies that led a generation of workers and youth into a dead end, and whose legacy helped give rise to today’s identity-politics pseudo-left.
The central problem with Elbaum’s book — and with the New Communist Movement itself — is what it left out: the working class. The radicalisation of the 1960s was real and reflected genuine social contradictions: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the crisis of American capitalism. But the New Communist Movement channelled that energy away from the independent political mobilisation of the working class and into the orbit of petty-bourgeois nationalism. The heroes of Elbaum’s book — Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers — represent not the Marxist tradition but its systematic falsification.
Identity politics vs Marxism
In chapter four, Woods spends a significant amount of time defending critical race theories and “identity politics”. Critical race theory is sometimes conflated with Marxism by critics on both right and left. The central theme of these theories replaces class analysis with competing forms of sectional politics that can be absorbed into capitalist institutions and the Democratic/centre‑left political apparatus. While racism, sexism and other oppressions are real and must be fought, their proper resolution requires a unifying working‑class strategy rooted in socialist politics—not a fragmentation into rival identities.
As Tom Carter, in his Introduction to Marxism vs Critical Race Theory, writes, “Critical race theory is a broad current, with many tributaries flowing into it and many offshoots flowing out of it. One can go to a library and walk down aisle upon aisle of shelves of this material, which at a surface level comprises many diverse and even internally contradictory trends that have emerged and shifted over time. In characterising this current, it is therefore useful to begin at the most basic level with its fundamental philosophical conceptions, the heritage of which can be traced to postmodernism and to the conceptions advanced by the Frankfurt School. This is the “critical theory” from which “critical race theory” emerges.
In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason. Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic thought is inherently authoritarian.”[4]
Stuart Hall
Another favourite radical of Wood’s is Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Like many radicals mentioned in the book, Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”.
Hall was the founding intellectual of Cultural Studies, the academic discipline centred at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1960s onward. He has been lionised in the liberal-left press as a pioneering theorist of race, identity, and culture. Hall’s career represents a politically coherent, decades-long effort to displace Marxism — specifically the Trotskyist current within it — and substitute identity politics and bourgeois reformism in its place.
In Paul Bond’s excellent obituary of Hall, he makes the following analysis: “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.
Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often supine. Despite his supposedly independent “Marxist” stance, Hall’s political outlook throughout his academic and political career aligned him closely with the Euro-communist wing of the old Stalinist Communist Party, and he eventually became a prominent writer for the magazine Marxism Today. The latter served as the ideological godfather of New Labour.[5]
Antonio Gramsci
Wood’s book is full of mentions of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci never used the term “Cultural Marxism. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony — the idea that bourgeois class rule is maintained not just through coercion but through ideological and cultural domination, through the “common sense” of everyday life — is a real and important contribution. The bourgeoisie rules not merely through the police and the army but because subordinate classes internalise its values, assumptions, and worldview. The struggle for socialism, therefore, requires a struggle for ideological and cultural leadership.
Gramsci is an attractive figure for Woods not merely for his cultural writings—many of which were produced during solitary confinement under the Mussolini fascist regime—but also for his attacks on economic determinism, his explicit rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification of the nationalist orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.
Woods is not the only intellectual to use Gramsci for a defence of their own politics. Over the decades, his work has been used by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985) and by a whole generation of “post-Marxist” academics. Gramsci’s work was turned into a rationale for abandoning the working class as the revolutionary subject.
The pseudo-left currents that claim Gramsci’s mantle have produced, in practice, exactly what their theory predicts: subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics. Syriza in Greece is the paradigm case, the most “prominent example of a pseudo-left organisation” that came to power, spouting empty populist phrases, and then carried out “a criminal betrayal” of Greek workers, imposing austerity more effectively than the right could have.
Wood’s book is useful only because it forces the reader to study a Marxist alternative to “Cultural Marxism”. The answer to both the right-wing “cultural Marxism” hysteria and the pseudo-left’s cultural politics is the same: a return to genuine Marxism
Notes
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.
The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique- David North Mehring Books
“Future historians will know the General Strike for what it is, a landmark in British history and its most important post-war event. A general strike is not an accident due to incidental causes, workmen misguided by agitators, the stock shibboleths of the Tory Press. It is a major political phenomenon ultimately springing from the profound dislocation of the entire economic and social system. Nothing else can so move millions of men to united action. It is the class-war in its most acute pre-revolutionary stage: the next stage is revolution.”
C. L. R. James
“The conclusion which I reach in my study is that Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals… Britain is moving towards revolution because the epoch of capitalist decline has set in. And if culprits are to be sought, then in answer to the question who and what are propelling Britain along the road to revolution, we must say: not Moscow, but New York.”
Leon Trotsky
“The only class I am afraid of is our own”
J.R. Clynes, Labour Party Politician
“What I dreaded about the strike, more than anything else, was this; if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened … That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted, at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army.”
J.H. Thomas, Trade Union Leader
It is hard not to agree with the points made by the Socialist Equality Party in its comments on the 1926 General Strike anniversary: “There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being a decisive moment in the history of the British and international working class. What will distinguish the SEP’s meetings from the slew of commemorative articles and books on 1926 is an examination of the general strike primarily from the standpoint of the disastrous line pursued by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), led by Joseph Stalin and his allies.”[1]
The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 is one of many slews published in the last few months. Described as a fresh, accessible history of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary – telling a story of working-class community then and now, “it is one of the better books on the subject. It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days.
Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor, feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant.
Both Cant and Lee write for the Notes from Below website. It is a working‑class repository of workplace testimony, petitions and grassroots labour reporting. It performs an important practical function: documenting the lived experience of workers, exposing employer abuses, and creating links between isolated shop‑floor struggles. For that reason alone, such initiatives deserve defence and engagement by socialists. But a class‑struggle analysis requires us to go beyond sympathetic description to evaluate the political and strategic implications of the material and the direction this sort of project advances.[2]
The reappearance of rank‑and‑file initiatives and worker blogs is a product of the deepening crisis of capitalism. As employers accelerate restructuring, automation and outsourcing, and as union bureaucracies increasingly organise class collaboration with management and the state, workers are forced to build their own communication platforms. This social reality accords with the need for independent rank-and-file initiatives and organisations.
Notes From Below primarily offers empirical materials: testimonies, minutes, and petitions. This is indispensable for breaking information blackouts and building solidarity. But empirical documentation by itself is not a political program. Lenin long argued that trade‑unionist economism — which confines politics to immediate economic demands and local grievances — will not by itself develop the conscious leadership required to overthrow capitalist rule; political consciousness must be consciously brought to the working class by a revolutionary organisation. Worker‑produced media can and should serve as a training ground for political education. Still, without explicit political independence and a program that links struggles to the need to overthrow capital, such projects can be outflanked by reformism and the trade‑union apparatus.[3]
So what are the lessons of the General Strike for today’s struggles? Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken place in the UK.
The action was launched in response to a massive attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing defeat.
But material conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Political leadership and organisation do. As Chris Marsden explains in his lecture, the decisive factor in the defeat was not only the state’s preparation—organisations for strikebreaking, emergency powers and armed forces—but also the political line imposed by the Comintern under Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev. That line subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to an alliance with the Trades Union Congress via the Anglo‑Russian Committee, treating the TUC General Council and its “left” representatives as safe conduits for “revolutionary” influence rather than exposing and combating them. The result was a catastrophic political misorientation: the CPGB was transformed into a left‑ginger group for the bureaucracy at the very moment when the class struggle required independent revolutionary leadership.[4]
The general strike of May 1926 was not merely a historical rupture confined to its nine official days; it was a concentrated expression of the objective crisis of British capitalism and the political maturity (and immaturity) of the working class at that historical juncture. The reader should note that a Marxist materialist analysis locates its significance in the interaction of social forces—the objective erosion of British imperialist power, the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the class relations that produced both immense industrial potential and profound political weakness.
The general strike objectively posed “which class shall rule?” The working class in 1926 had the industrial capacity to disrupt capitalist reproduction yet lacked a party capable of transforming industrial militancy into political power. As Marsden’s 1926 strike lecture emphasises, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Comintern-influenced Communist Party acted to contain and demobilise revolutionary potential. The result was a strategic defeat whose lessons include the catastrophic consequences when the labour bureaucracy or opportunist “lefts” substitute themselves for proletarian political independence.
A century later, objective conditions again make a general strike a live political possibility. Global capitalism is convulsed by stagnation, inflation, war and austerity. It is important to see the connection between the historical weaknesses exposed in 1926 and the present-day degeneration of unions and reformist parties. The trade union apparatus today often functions as a corporatist arm of capital, seeking to manage and suppress rather than lead independent working-class offensives.
The social weight of the working class, its international integration, and the development of rank-and-file initiatives create objective conditions far more favourable to revolutionary politics than those that existed in 1926.
1926 is not an exhausted archive; it is a living repository of lessons for 2026. Capital’s crisis, the bankruptcy of union bureaucracies and the emergence of rank-and-file militancy mean the objective possibility of a general strike—and with it, the political question of power—again stands on the agenda. The working class must learn from the past not to repeat its errors: organise democratically in the workplaces, coordinate internationally, and build the independent revolutionary leadership necessary to turn strikes into a socialist strategy. The future is written in the material contradictions of the present; the past supplies the lessons to read it.
Chris Hayes is one of the more articulate voices on the “left.” His 2025 book, The Sirens’ Call, is well written and at times thoughtful. However, his politics are mostly characteristic of the petty‑bourgeois layer that passes for the contemporary media “left”: critical in tone, reformist in content, and ultimately subordinate to the interests and institutions of the ruling class.
Hayes—formerly a prominent host on MSNBC and a widely read public intellectual—has for years occupied a political position that illustrates the contradictions and dangers of the media “left.” His arguments, style and role function not as an organ of working-class struggle but as a channel by which layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and professional-class radicals are integrated into the interests and strategies of the capitalist state.
Readers familiar with Hayes’s other books and media work will know that he operates within a media and institutional milieu whose social base is the upper strata of the middle class—journalists, academics, think-tank professionals, and professional managers. As far as I can tell, Hayes is not linked to or is a member of any radical party, but for the sake of clarity, it would be safe to say that he is from the same social layer as other “pseudo-lefts”:
Hayes’ early career was spent within a network whose executives, shareholders, and advertising base are embedded in the capitalist class. As a recent article on the WSWS leading broadcasters and columnists “operate in effect as the public faces of their respective firms” and must conform to corporate priorities to keep their platforms and fortunes” Hayes’s career has largely been spent making criticisms acceptable only up to the point where they do not threaten corporate clients, advertisers, financial interests or imperialist foreign policy He is a prime example of how individual dissent is tolerated so long as it stabilises, rather than challenges, the system. I doubt we will see Hayes on the barricades anytime soon.
During Hayes’s former program, he often performed the ritual of exposing outrages (inequality, racism, corruption), but the structural constraints of corporate ownership limited the reach of those critiques. The result is a media ecology where “critical” voices reinforce, rather than rupture, the legitimacy of capitalist institutions by confining debate within narrow parameters. Hayes’s style—moral passion, policy technocracy, and denunciations of right-wing reaction—fits this social function. He channels legitimate anger at inequality into policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. This can radicalise public sentiment, but simultaneously diverts class anger into institutional remedies that leave capitalist property relations intact.
The political consciousness of media commentators like Hayes does not develop in a political vacuum. Their professional positions are secured by corporate media conglomerates, venture capital, and advertising markets embedded in global capitalism. The need to retain access to funding sources, advertising revenue, and elite networks naturally inclines such figures toward compromises with state and corporate power. The result: a politics of “reform” that is simultaneously anti‑Trump, pro‑liberal intervention, and protective of the neoliberal order’s basic rules.
The same political outlook that guides Hayes’s media work is carried into his books. No more so than in The Siren’s Call. Hayes knows his audience. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he knows his song before he starts singing. The Siren’s Call, like much of the punditry produced within the corporate media, performs an important political function: it channels popular anger and democratic anxieties into narratives that stop short of challenging the economic and class foundations of society. His audience is politically conscious but still embedded within the institutions of the bourgeois state and corporate media. This book is written to diagnose social problems accurately enough to win credibility—unequal power, corrupt elites, erosion of democratic norms—but then it prescribes solutions that leave capitalism fundamentally untouched.
To sum up, the siren call that Hayes and his Pseudo-Left friends offer—reform, managerial solutions, moralism—must be answered by a socialist perspective capable of ending capitalist rule.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”
George Orwell 1984
“One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilisation.”
John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)
“History is the study of all the world’s crime.”
Voltaire, French writer and philosopher (1694-1778)
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
Alan Bennett, English playwright (1934- )
A People’s History of Portugal is a valuable reconstruction of the last two hundred years of class struggle in Portugal. Raquel Varela writes, “In A People’s History of Portugal, written with Roberto della Santa, we develop the idea that Portuguese capitalism was dependent on British capitalism, in the sense of Ellen Wood’s notion of capitalism being exported by the British Empire to the periphery and semi-periphery”.[1]
Raquel Varela and Roberto Della Santa are contemporary historians whose work on Portugal must be assessed not as an abstract literary or moral account but as a political and social explanation rooted in concrete class relations. The central question posed by Santa and Varela and their “people’s history” is: which social forces and material conditions produced the events described, and how did political forms (parties, the army, unions) mediate the class struggle in Portugal?
Both Raquel Varela’s and Roberto Della Santa’s work belongs to a broad current in historiography often called the people’s history genre: recovering the struggles, experiences and agency of oppressed groups omitted from elite-centred narratives. This genre has considerable value insofar as it corrects bourgeois forgetfulness and restores the working class and oppressed peoples to the centre of historical inquiry.
One of the most important exponents of the genre put this way: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwards looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience”.[2]
While this genre is legitimate and entirely worthwhile, the reader should know that, from the standpoint of orthodox Marxism, the recovery of forgotten facts is only the first step. Marxist historiography insists that facts be integrated into a scientific, materialist explanation that locates political consciousness and social movements in the social relations of production, class antagonisms and objective economic laws.
The father of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov insisted that institutions, laws, and human ideas must be explained by deeper material relations and class interests, writing “The historical development of mankind is reasonable in the sense that it is law-governed; but the law-governed nature of historical development does not yet prove at all that its ultimate cause must be sought in the views of men or in their opinions”.[3]
Why is Varela’s and Santa’s A People’s History of Portugal an important popular intervention? Because it recovers the social struggles, popular organisations and class conflicts that conventional bourgeois national histories either marginalise or explain away. From a classical Marxist standpoint, the value of Varela’s work lies less in doctrinal purity than in its insistence that classes and masses make history or as Karl Marx put it so succinctly ““Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[4]
From the standpoint of a materialist conception of history, the people’s history method has two strengths: it exposes elite crimes and centres subordinate agency; and, in doing so, it helps break the ideological monopoly of official history. It also has its limits, as Marxist historian Tom Mackaman pointed out in his assessment of Howard Zinn. “ While it helps bring to light facts omitted from standard textbooks, Zinn’s work can only serve as a beginning in understanding US history. There is an unmistakable anachronistic, even a-historical, thread in A People’s History. If it has a theme, it is an endless duel between “resistance” and “control,” two of Zinn’s preferred words.
Populating his historical stage are, on the one side, a virtually unbroken line of “Establishment” villains who exercise this control and, on the other, benighted groups who often struck out against their plight. The names and dates change; the story does not. Complexity and contradiction do not rest comfortably in such a schema. The limitations of this approach are most evident in Zinn’s treatment of the American Revolution and the US Civil War, which he presents as instances of the elite beguiling the population to strengthen its control”.[5]
Raquel Varela’s erudition is plain to see in this scholarly book. Her work is noted for its attention to labour, popular movements and transnational dimensions of working-class struggle. She makes an important empirical contribution by documenting struggles and networks often neglected by mainstream historiography. Her work helps restore the subjectivity and agency of the working class to historical study, an indispensable corrective to bourgeois historiography.
But from the standpoint of Marxist science, any historiography must move beyond documentation to explanation, and that requires a mapping of the class composition and material interests of actors. It also needs an analysis of how material constraints shaped state and party forms. If left at the level of primarily descriptive, it can be hijacked by reformism or identity politics. Unfortunately, most books of this genre fall into this ideological trap.
In this book, Varela writes of the experiences of peasants, workers, and popular movements — showing how changes in production, imperialism and property relations shape politics and ideas. Varela’s narrative demonstrates how Portugal’s late and dependent capitalist development, colonial plunder and landlordism produced a fragmented bourgeoisie, a precarious working class and mass emigration — objective conditions that repeatedly gave rise to political radicalisation.
Varela and Santa reconstruct crucial episodes — the liberal revolutions, the rise of the republic, the consolidation of Salazar’s Estado Novo, the colonial wars, and the Carnation Revolution of 1974 — as outcomes of deeper economic and social contradictions. [6] Varela’s people-centred focus complements previous historiography showing how popular assemblies, strikes and local organisations expressed and attempted to resolve those objective contradictions. The book makes clear that Portugal’s political oscillations — reactionary regimes, fragile reformisms, anti-colonial wars — were not merely the result of individual leaders but rooted in capitalist development and imperial relations. The book is valuable because, by narrating the lives and struggles of ordinary people, Varela helps break bourgeois historiographical isolation of politics from production and class interest.
While invaluable as social history, Varela is not an orthodox Marxist, and her account can only understate the decisive political question of leadership. The Carnation Revolution contained both an immense revolutionary potential and a political defeat: social democracy, Stalinism and pseudo-left currents helped channel working-class power back into capitalist institutions.[7]
Raquel Varela’s A People’s History of Portugal is well worth reading, and I would recommend this book. It is a crucial corrective to elite-centred history: it returns the reader to popular agency, material forces and class struggle. Despite its limitations, it offers a rich source of historiography and allows for rigorous analysis by general readers and Marxists alike. Only by combining social-historical recovery with Leninist-Trotskyist political organisation can the working class carry out the socialist transformation of society. Given the rise of Trump and his fascist oligarchy, this is an urgent historical necessity.
Notes
Social Conflicts in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1975: Raquel Varela and Joana Alcântara Le Travail, FALL 2014 AUTOMNE, Vol. 74
Raquel Varela. A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution. Ed. By Peter Robinson. Transl. [from Portuguese] by Sean Purdy. Pluto Press
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
― John Milton, Areopagitica
“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”
Karl Marx
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
To say that this small book of just 47 pages has gone under the radar would be an understatement. A Google and Bing search has produced no mention, reviews, or even an image of the book cover. A scenario that would not look out of place in Stalin’s Russia or in George Orwell’s 1984. This is all the stranger since Andrew Milner is a significant scholar and has produced a substantial amount of work on John Milton.
John Milton (1608–1674) is best known for Paradise Lost. He was also a vigorous political writer (Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) who defended freedom of conscience and republican principles in the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s work is historically and culturally useful. He illuminates the ideas and political disputes of the 17th‑century bourgeois revolution in England, the rise of parliamentary power, and the ideological roots of modern notions of liberty and censorship.
Milner is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party and a Marxist literary scholar who has situated John Milton’s poetry and prose within the political and social context of the English Revolution. In this small book, Milner seeks to show how Milton’s imagery, rhetoric and political tracts are bound up with the emergent class formations, religious conflicts and ideological struggles of seventeenth‑century England. He is primarily known as a literary and cultural theorist; his work deals with ideology, culture, and intellectual history. His work addresses ideology, aesthetics and the left’s intellectual history. That terrain is important because ideology shapes class consciousness, and the battle over ideas is a necessary front in the class struggle.
However, cultural analysis alone cannot substitute for a rigorous political-economic account of property relations, surplus appropriation and class power. Classical Marxism holds that consciousness is rooted in material conditions; therefore, cultural critiques must be integrated into analyses of the social relations of production and the balance of class forces. Milton’s poetry and prose are embedded in the English revolutionary conjuncture. His biblical epic and tragic forms are works where he questions authority, liberty, and social order. Milner reads Milton’s theological motifs as ideological representations tied to emergent bourgeois and republican tendencies, while also acknowledging the contradictions and ambiguities in Milton’s voice.
Milner’s body of work, including this book, situates the poet within the political and social convulsions of the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s poetry and prose are productive areas for analysing how class conflict, ideology, and revolutionary consciousness are represented, contested and mythologised in literature. Studying Milton through Milner’s revolutionary eyes teaches how literature both reflects and shapes class consciousness.
Socialist Workers Party
At this point, it is worth examining Milner’s politics. Milner, as was said, is a member of the British SWP, which does not represent orthodox Marxism. Along with comrades in the SWP, he belongs to a tradition that broke with orthodox Trotskyism in the mid‑20th century and developed the state‑capitalist analysis of the USSR (most associated with figures like Tony Cliff).
For Cliff and the International Socialism tendency, regimes that nationalised industry but retained wage labour and commodity production were analysed as forms of capitalism in which the state functions as the collective capitalist; thus, they rejected the Trotskyist formulation of a degenerated workers’ state and argued for an independent revolutionary strategy oriented to overthrowing bureaucratic rule. In the 2010s, it was riven by a political and moral crisis around leadership, internal democracy and allegations of sexual abuse.
Although Milner’s book illuminates how bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois cultural forms mediate working-class experience, it still risks idealism if detached from concrete, empirical investigation of the organisation of production and the state. Some critics have argued that Milner collapses literary meaning into class interest, treating Milton as merely an ideological mouthpiece of a social class rather than a complex, contradictory subject. Perhaps a more serious charge, one in which the great historian Christopher Hill was also charged with, was cherry-picking passages or contexts that fit a class‑interest thesis while ignoring counter‑evidence in Milton’s prose and reception.
In the book, Milner cites Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson as early influences. It is entirely correct to look at the work of these major historians when it comes to evaluating John Milton.
Christopher Hill treated seventeenth‑century literature as part of a revolutionary conjuncture. Hill’s interpretive stance is class-centred and teleological. He reads Milton as embedded in the Puritan radical tradition. He locates literary production within the contours of political conflict, ideology, and mobilisation. This is the Marxist tradition in history that emphasises the structures and social forces that shape ideas—Milton becomes a voice within a contested social order.
Hill’s major contribution was to relocate the English Revolution from a narrow constitutional dispute among elites into a broad social and cultural upheaval rooted in class conflict. Works such as Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England and The World Turned Upside Down argue that the upheavals of the 1640s were driven by changing material conditions—agrarian transformation, commercial expansion, and the rise of new classes and layers within the population—thereby producing religious and political movements ranging from Puritans to Levellers and Diggers. Hill’s method was classic historical materialism: ideas and texts are treated as expressions of social forces and class interests rather than as autonomous abstractions.
Hill emphasised the dialectical interaction between structural changes and conscious political action: material crises opened space for radical ideas, which in turn reshaped social relations until countervailing forces produced new stabilisations. His sensitivity to popular religion, millenarianism, and the “culture of protest” made visible the agency of Milton’s political tracts—Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his numerous pamphlets—which must be read as ideological interventions in the convulsive politics of the 1640s and 1650s. Milton defended republican sovereignty, individual conscience and vehement opposition to censorship; his positions reflected a fragment of the emergent bourgeois‑republican current and the layers of intellectuals allied with parliamentary and anti‑royalist forces. His great epic, Paradise Lost, also encodes the metaphysical and moral anxieties of a society undergoing revolutionary reconfiguration.
On the other hand, E. P. Thompson, by contrast, insisted on the agency, experience and consciousness of social subjects. Where Hill stresses the structures and propensities of classes, Thompson recovers lived mentality: culture is both produced by and constitutive of working-class self-activity. Applied to Milton, Thompson’s method would press you to examine how Milton’s language and political interventions circulated among social groups, how readers appropriated or resisted his ideas, and how ideological formations were lived and transformed.
Andrew Milner’s work on John Milton situates Milton’s poetry and prose within the political struggles of seventeenth‑century England and the emergence of the modern public sphere. Milner shows Milton not simply as an isolated literary genius but as a political writer whose formal choices—pamphlet rhetoric, epic mode, religious imagery—intervene in class conflict, state formation and the struggle over free speech. Milner’s contributions to cultural theory enrich our understanding of ideology and intellectual history. Still, they cannot replace the scientific analysis of class, property and state that classical Marxism provides.
“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Walter Benjamin
“Even the Dead Won’t Be Safe”: Walter Benjamin
“Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”
Bertolt Brecht
In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]
Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.
Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin’s formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.
As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.
The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]
Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.
The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.
As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, “Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him”.[3]
Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.
Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky
At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.
To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.
Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.
Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, “Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?” This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture’s mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]
Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]
Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.
Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism
Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left’s organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.
Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.
Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky’s writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.
Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.
The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky’s writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.
[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.
[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003
[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html
Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.
Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]
His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians’ practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers’ lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.
Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.
The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group’s political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.
Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review
Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.
Samuel’s main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.
As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]
From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.
Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People’s History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.
People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]
The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.
The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.
Workshop of the World
Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.
He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.
Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.
But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.
Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.
The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class’s capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.
At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.
Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists
There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.
But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.
Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.
Origins of People’s History
Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.
People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.
In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.
There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”
However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.
Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994
Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.
As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]
Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.
Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel’s work and E.P. Thompson’s. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers’ material conditions and lived struggles.
Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.
These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, “The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]
The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.
Contemporary relevance
Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.
From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.
[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
[2] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world
[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time
“ A regime whose leadership was increasingly entrapped in economic and political contradictions largely of its own making and that sought escape or resolution or maintenance of its distinctive identity through a series of sudden lurches in policy and ever more explosive risk-taking.”
Tim Mason
“In the meantime, the first characteristic of a really revolutionary party is to be able to look reality in the face.”
― Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
“Fascism, as I recall from many discussions in Berlin in the 1960s, was not just an epoch which ended in 1945, but was also something which the Christian Democrats and the right wing of the Social Democrats were then trying to reinstate in a less barbaric form,”
Tim Mason.
Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night was not so much a speech from a president but the rantings of an aspiring Führer, though with somewhat less decorum than an address by Hitler before the German Reichstag. It was vicious, violent and depraved, plumbing the depths of cultural and political degradation in the United States.
Joseph Kishore
The opening quote from Tim Mason could be very easily applied to the current fascist regime in the White House. David North’s article Trump, the Epstein files and the putrefaction of the American oligarchy led me to Tim Mason.[1]
I want to say that I discovered Mason’s work through years of study, but that would be a lie. As is usually the case, I found Mason’s work through the Marxist writer David North. North’s antennae for excellent historians is second to none. So when North calls Mason a “Brilliant historian”, I felt the need to examine his work, which led me to this book.
Tim Mason is one of the most important Marxist historians of German fascism. His work situates the rise of Nazism not in the realm of individual pathology or cultural uniqueness, as is common in modern-day historiography, but as a historically specific response by sections of the ruling class to the interaction between an acute capitalist crisis and a powerful, independent working‑class movement. Mason did his best to apply the classical materialist conception of history. He believed that political forms and ideologies were rooted in concrete class relations.
The main importance of this book is that fascism in Germany emerged from a conjuncture in which capitalist elites faced an existential threat. The economic dislocation of the late Weimar years (the Great Depression, mass unemployment), combined with the extraordinary militancy and organisation of the working class, created a situation in which portions of the bourgeoisie concluded that ordinary parliamentary rule and social‑democratic collaboration could not guarantee the defence of their property and privileges. In this context, reactionary, extra‑parliamentary means—mobilising mass petty‑bourgeois resentment, paramilitaries and nationalist ideology—were adopted to smash the labour movement and restore capitalist rule.
In the introduction to this book, Jane Caplan explains that academics and writers have argued that Mason underplays the role of ideology, culture and contingency; others say he gives too much causal weight to the working class as a stimulus for fascism, suggesting a more active role of conservative elites and mass petty‑bourgeois currents. These debates are not abstractions: they affect how readers orient tactually. If fascism is seen primarily as a crisis response to working‑class strength, the strategic implication is the urgency of political leadership and unity in the labour movement to preclude the ruling class’s resort to authoritarian rule.
Again, Mason’s examination of the rise of Nazi Germany would not look out of place with today’s fascist regime in America. He writes, “The only ‘solution’ open to this regime of the structural tensions and crises produced by dictatorship and rearmament was more dictatorship and more rearmament, then expansion, then war and terror, then plunder and enslavement. The stark, ever-present alternative was collapse and chaos, and so all solutions were temporary, hectic, hand-to-mouth affairs, increasingly barbaric improvisations around a brutal theme. … A war for the plunder of manpower and materials lay square in the dreadful logic of German economic development under National Socialist rule. [Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class (Cambridge, 1995), p.51]
Tim Mason and Daniel Goldhagen: two poles in the historiography of Nazism
One of Mason’s admirable characteristics was his ability not to back down in an academic fight. One of the tragedies of his way-too-short life was that he was unable to take on Daniel Goldhagen and his right-wing historiography of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. The debate between the interpretations advanced by Tim Mason and Daniel Goldhagen would not simply have been an academic quarrel about sources and method. They would have reflected deeper theoretical and political divergences over how to explain the rise of fascism, the social roots of mass political crimes, and the relationship between ideology and material interests.
Daniel Goldhagen’s bestseller argued that a uniquely German, popular “eliminationist” anti‑Semitism made ordinary Germans willing perpetrators of the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s thesis reduces complex historical processes to an abstract identity — “the German” — stripping out class antagonisms, the decisive role of political institutions, and the contingency of mass politics. From a Marxist standpoint, this is an example of vulgar abstraction: it substitutes a quasi‑cultural essentialism for a scientific inquiry into social forces and interests.
As North writes, “The works that attract the greatest attention are precisely those which leave unchallenged, or actually reinforce, the basest prejudices and misconceptions. Daniel Goldhagen’s immensely successful and thoroughly deplorable Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust falls within this category. The principal theme of Goldhagen’s book is easily summarised. The cause of the Holocaust is to be found in the mindset and beliefs of the Germans. A vast national collective, the German people, motivated by a uniquely German anti-Semitic ideology, carried out a Germanic enterprise, the Holocaust. The systematic killing of Jews became a national pastime, in which all Germans who were given the opportunity gladly and enthusiastically participated.”[2]
Mason places the rise of Nazism firmly in the context of the global economic collapse after 1929. The Great Depression produced mass unemployment, wage cuts, and sharp volatility in employment and social standards. For millions of workers, this was not an abstract crisis but a concrete experience of dispossession: sudden loss of work, decline in living standards, and acute fear for the future.
As the Marxist economist Nick Beams writes, “The Nazi movement was handed the reins of power by the German ruling elites because there was no other party capable of carrying through the destruction of the organised working class and socialist movement. They certainly hoped that they might be able to curb some of the Nazi “excesses”. But at every stage, the costs were too high. There was always the danger that any conflict with the Nazis would ignite a movement from below, so that in the end the “excesses” were an acceptable price to pay. Within the thinking of the Nazi leadership, racism and the drive to exterminate the Jews may have taken priority over all other issues. But that does not settle the question. By pointing to the primacy of economics, Marxism does not, in the final analysis, maintain that behind every political leader’s decisions there is an economic motivation that ideology is used to conceal. It means that economic interests—the material interests of the ruling classes—determine the broad sweep of politics. And there is no question that the destruction of the socialist and workers’ movement, a necessary precondition for the Holocaust, and the war aimed at the conquest and colonisation of the Soviet Union, out of which it arose, were both determined by the “class interests of big German capital.”[3]
Mason, like Beams, emphasises that the German working class was not monolithic. He explains why the Nazis seduced some sections of the working class. The Nazi party included “socialism” in its name as a strategic, populist tactic to attract working-class support by redefining the term to mean national and racial unity rather than class struggle. According to historical analysis, this “socialism” was a deliberate deception, as Hitler rejected Marxist ideology, purged the party’s anti-capitalist wing, and quickly dismantled worker organisations upon seizing power.
Deindustrialisation in some sectors, the growth of precarious employment, the displacement of skilled artisans, and the erosion of stable trade‑union frameworks produced a fragmented class with differing material interests and levels of political organisation. This social differentiation made it easier for reactionary appeals—national renewal, order, and protection against “foreign” competition or communist upheaval—to resonate with particular strata (skilled workers facing downward mobility, the unemployed mass of casual labourers, and workers in small towns reliant on conservative employers).
Mason highlights the role of employers, the state and conservative elites in channelling working‑class discontent toward fascism. Sections of big business and the conservative state apparatus actively sought a political force capable of smashing independent labour organisations and breaking left‑wing resistance. By presenting Nazism as a bulwark against Bolshevism and economic chaos, the ruling class offered a political instrument that promised restoration of order and protection for property—even if at the price of authoritarianism.
A decisive political factor in Mason’s account is the bankruptcy of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. The SPD had become integrated into the bourgeois democratic apparatus and was unable or unwilling to generalise working‑class struggles into a political challenge to capitalist rule. The KPD, following Comintern directives, pursued an “ultra‑left” line that labelled social democrats as “social‑fascists,” refusing a united front against the Nazi threat. Mason shows how this dual failure—reformist accommodation on the one hand, sectarian isolation on the other—left the working class without a coherent mass leadership to resist fascist encroachment. This echoes Trotsky’s warning that fascism triumphs where revolutionary organisations fail politically.
Mason does not ignore ideology: nationalist myths, anti‑parliamentary resentments, fear of social breakdown, and conservative cultural values mediated workers’ interpretation of their material distress. But for Mason, these subjective factors do not arise from the “spontaneity” of mind; they derive from real material insecurities and the absence of an alternative political program. The petty‑bourgeois layers and strata within the working class, pushed by crisis into reactionary horizons, were particularly vulnerable to promises of national revival and social ordering.
In Mason’s dialectical account, fascist support among workers results from the interaction of objective capitalist crisis, social differentiation within the working class, active intervention by capitalist elites, and fatal political errors by the mass parties. The result was a shift of parts of the working class into alignment—tactical, sometimes coerced—with a movement whose program was unmistakably counter‑working‑class.
Shortly before his death, Mason became acutely aware of the growth of postmodern tendencies in academic historiography. He was enough of a Marxist to understand that this was a grave threat to Marxist historiography. Mason argued that Marxism rests on philosophical materialism and the dialectical method: thought reflects an objective world whose development can be studied and whose laws (including class relations and the dynamics of capitalism) can be grasped and acted upon. Against this, postmodernism declares an “incredulity toward metanarratives” and relativises truth, undermining the possibility of a coherent, class‑based theory of social change.
In a paper at the end of this book, Mason writes, “I was bemused and depressed by the scholasticism of much methodological left-wing writing,” he explained in one exemplary passage; “…militancy congests into clamorous categories, producing works which might be the offspring of a proud union between a prayer wheel and a sausage-machine” (207-8).
A final word in this review should be a brief examination of the History Workshop movement, in which Mason played a central part. The movement revitalised social history by centring subaltern experience, oral history and labour culture. Its recuperation of working-class traditions corrected elite-centred historiography and helped politicise a generation of researchers and activists. The movement’s democratic ethos—valorising rank-and-file memory and grassroots initiative—is an important corrective to bureaucratic or sectarian historiography.
Yet the History Workshop often veered toward empiricism and culturalism, sometimes treating political outcomes as emergent properties of cultural forms rather than outcomes of class struggle mediated by organisational and programmatic relations. From a Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist standpoint, culture must be read as an expression of class relations, and cultural analysis must be subordinated to—indeed, dialectically united with—analysis of the economic base, party politics, and international dynamics. Plekhanov’s insistence that theory must be the instrument for developing proletarian self-consciousness remains a guide: historical research must illuminate the pathways by which objective material processes generate class-political possibilities, and how conscious organisation can raise class forces to realise them (Plekhanov on dialectical materialism).
To summarise, Mason’s contribution to an understanding of Fascism is important because it rejects simplistic monocausal accounts and insists on analysing real social layers and interests rather than treating “the working class” as a single, undifferentiated actor. This is a genuinely historical-materialist starting point: social consciousness is rooted in concrete material conditions and the class.
Studying Mason and the History Workshop is not an academic pastime divorced from politics. In the present era of capitalism’s intensified crisis, mass poverty and the decay of reformist leaderships, recovering the social history of working-class organisation provides tactical lessons. One thing is clear: Mason would have had a field day examining the rise of fascism in the United States. His contribution to a Marxist understanding of Fascism is solely missed.
[2] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[3] Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html
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A Trumpet of Sedition 