A walking guide recovers two centuries of struggle in the capital, yet it fails to provide readers with the political lessons that these struggles were intended to convey.

Ninety years on from the Battle of Cable Street, the debate about London’s radical past is far from academic. In a city currently marked by such extreme social inequality, by the crisis of housing affordability, by the decline of public services and by the re-emergence of a kind of nationalism and anti-migrant politics, the history of those who had fought against poverty, exploitation, political repression and fascism is very much with us.

This is what makes the third edition of David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints a particularly valuable contribution. It is neither a conventional history of London nor merely a guidebook. Rather, it offers a political geography of the city, built from the author’s own walks, connecting streets and buildings to the movements that occurred there. Pluto Press describes the revised edition as guiding the reader from well-known to lesser-known sites associated with struggles from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The third edition substantially revises the book, now comprising eleven main chapters. The Russian Revolution and the East End, Hackney, and radical Soho all receive new or reorganised treatment. The volume concludes with an epilogue on the Brick Lane struggles of the 1970s, and Michael Rosen provides the foreword.

The enterprise is immense. Rosenberg brings workers, immigrants, women, political exiles, anti-fascists, and socialist organisers back into the picture in a way they have largely been absent. The significance of the history he recovers makes the shortcomings of his political approach all the more glaring. Rebel Footprints is absolutely full of the notion that history is made through struggle. It simply doesn’t come to terms with the question of why movements of such immense courage and such broad popular support ended up with such limited political outcomes, why they were defeated or why they were absorbed into institutions which were themselves committed to the defence of the social order against which those movements had been directed. The central issue is therefore a question of political perspective. It is a history of rebellion, but not a history of the working class’s struggle for revolutionary leadership.

A rebellious city

The underlying concept of Rebel Footprints is absolutely effective. The streets we normally see as routes between railway stations, offices, shops, and houses are reconfigured as physical evidence of political struggle. London stops being the endless accumulation of palaces, monuments and institutions of the state as presented to us by the tourist industry. It becomes a landscape of contestation.

The 2026 edition begins with “Trailblazers for Democracy in Fleet Street and Clerkenwell”, followed by “Sparks of Rebellion in Bow and Whitechapel”. It then explores “The Russian Revolution and London’s East End”, “No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury”, “Hackney’s Buried Histories” and the struggle for housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. Subsequent chapters move south and west through Battersea and Soho, then head east again to Poplar, Bermondsey, and, finally, Cable Street and Long Lane. The historical itinerary continues beyond the main chapters with the epilogue, “Battleground Brick Lane 1970s”.

In my view, this is one of Rosenberg’s real masterpieces. The geographical structure prevents radical history from being boiled down to the life stories of a few famous people. Political movements get a locality. They had meeting houses, workshops, factories, tenements and streets. Rosenberg has been running London social and political history walks since 2008. When talking about the genesis of the project, he has been very clear about the influence of Bill Fishman, the historian who believed you could understand history in a very real way, not just through the lecture hall but by walking through the very places where it happened. That is a very democratic approach. It’s a way of confronting the monumental history of the city that the ruling class has always presented as its own.

History against official London

This is where Rebel Footprints is at its very best. London’s history is increasingly being presented through the lens of heritage, tourism and property. The working people who actually built the city are only there in passing. Rosenberg flips the script completely. The centre of historical interest moves from Westminster, the monarchy and the City to the political activity of the very people who are normally invisible. The book is designed to get you to look at the apparently mundane and ask a very different set of questions: who lived here, who worked here, who organised here and what struggles took place here?

That approach has real power in a city which is constantly being reshaped by property speculation. Working-class areas get redeveloped and repackaged, and their social history is often turned into marketable ‘heritage’. Rosenberg’s approach is the other way around. The city itself becomes the archive. The history is also inherently international. London was not just the British capital. All over the world, industrialisation, empire and political repression have brought workers, refugees and political exiles into the city. Radical London was never a purely English phenomenon.

History is of course particularly pertinent when migrants are once again being presented as the cause of social problems they didn’t create. The history of workers breaking down national, ethnic, and religious barriers points overwhelmingly to a class explanation of inequality. The very notion of internationalism in the labour movement is, however, problematic, and Rebel Footprints doesn’t address it adequately. London was both the epicentre of working-class resistance and the capital of the world’s largest empire. The relationship between those two realities is fundamental to understanding British labour history.

The Russian Revolution comes to the East End

One of the most significant additions in the 2026 edition is a whole chapter on ‘The Russian Revolution and London’s East End’. That massively broadens the political canvas. The Russian Revolution can’t just be tacked on as part of the general tradition of London radicalism. October 1917 was a moment of total rupture. For the first time, the working class, under Marxist leadership, took state power and began reconstructing society on a socialist basis. That in itself was a moment of international political significance, and Britain was no different.

The importance of the Russian Revolution to the British working class cannot be confined to inspiration, solidarity, and radical culture. It sparked a major debate about revolutionary organisation, reformism, and the working class’s political independence. That debate had a very real and tangible effect on the British labour movement. This is where the distinction between radical history and Marxist history becomes so important. Radicalism is such a broad term that it can cover everything from democrats to anarchists, pacifists, syndicalists, feminists, trade unionists, Labour reformists, communists, and revolutionary Marxists. What these different tendencies had in common was that they all provided diametrically opposed answers to the fundamental questions of state, capitalism, imperialism and political leadership. To absorb them into a single category of ‘radicalism’ and celebrate them as such risks erasing the very disagreements that ultimately shaped history.

The Labour Party as the destination of struggle

This is clearest where the histories of local revolt intersect with the growth of Labourism. You can see it in many of the people you met in Rosenberg’s London who went from militant working-class politics to parliamentary Labourism. It wasn’t just a series of individual biographies. It was a fundamental process in shaping the British labour movement.

The key historical question, of course, is why. The reformist interpretation is that the Labour Party, the recognition of trade unions, municipal reform, and ultimately the post-war welfare state were simply the institutionalisation of the popular struggles of the 19th century. In that view, the rebels of the 19th century are the forerunners of 20th century social democracy.

A Marxist account has to put the issue in a different light. Reform and revolution were alternative approaches to the problem, stemming from different conceptions of the capitalist state. The point is that reform in itself doesn’t alter the capitalist relations of property or the nature of state power. The 20th century has shown time and again that reforms won under pressure from the working class can be taken away when the balance of class forces has shifted. British working-class radicalism therefore cannot be thought of as having reached its logical conclusion in the Labour Party. Labourism itself has to be a subject of historical analysis.

Poplar and the limits of municipal socialism

The Poplar struggle is the textbook example. The willingness of the councillors to go to jail rather than impose such onerous burdens on the poor working people was absolutely a landmark moment in London labour history. It was a demonstration of what could happen when a body of elected representatives was under the pressure of a mobilised working class. Poplar also, of course, highlights the limits of municipal politics. Municipal socialism can redistribute resources within the boundaries of the national state. It cannot abolish the capitalist social relations that are the very source of inequality.

This is particularly pertinent to George Lansbury. You can’t understand his political evolution in terms of sheer personal courage or moral commitment alone. You have to see it as part of the evolution of Labourism. Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going? (1925) is still absolutely essential precisely because it looked at the contradictions of British reformism at a time of intensifying class struggle. Trotsky argued that the apparent gradualism and peacefulness of British politics masked deep-seated class antagonisms. That argument is not confined to Lansbury. Workers could be extremely militant within organisations which were formally and in practice nationally reformist. That contradiction is the thread which runs through much of the history Rosenberg reconstructs.

Battersea and the politics of accommodation

The Battersea section is another example of the book’s strength in that it doesn’t present a one-dimensional political picture. It’s very much a geographical chapter in which south London is not some marginal area to the more ‘familiar’ revolutionary history of the East End. Of course, you have the same thing with individuals who start out in working-class and socialist movements and then go on to become quite accommodative of the existing order. Those shifts too can’t be explained by biography alone. They resulted from very specific historical and material conditions. The strength of British capitalism, the huge amount of capital accumulated through empire, the power of the parliamentary system and the development of a privileged trade union bureaucracy all exerted a pressure on the labour movement.

That’s why London’s history is inextricably bound up with Britain’s position as an imperial power. The same city which was home to such profound levels of poverty was the administrative and financial heart of the empire. The fact that such extreme poverty coexisted with the metropolis’s immense wealth was a direct consequence of the international structure of British capitalism. You simply can’t make sense of the particular vigour of British reformism without placing imperialism at the very centre of the analysis rather than at the margins.

Cable Street: heroism and political mythology

The chapter on Cable Street remains inevitably one of the most powerful parts of this historical landscape. The Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 belongs to the collective memory of London’s working class because Jewish, Irish and other workers mobilised against Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement and attempts to march through the East End.

There is every reason to defend this memory. But Cable Street must also be rescued from mythology. The question is not whether Communist Party members and supporters fought courageously. Many unquestionably did. The historical problem is the politics of Stalinism and the Popular Front. By 1936 the Communist International had abandoned the revolutionary internationalism associated with the October Revolution. The Popular Front subordinated the independent political movement of workers to alliances with supposedly democratic sections of the bourgeoisie.

This was not an abstract dispute occurring somewhere outside the history Rosenberg describes. At precisely the time British workers confronted fascists in London, the Spanish Revolution posed questions of state power, revolution, and counter-revolution with immense urgency. Any account that commemorates anti-fascist militancy while treating the Popular Front primarily as a strategy of broad democratic unity misses the fundamental political issue. Courage cannot substitute for programme. Indeed, that is one of the central lessons running through twentieth-century history: workers repeatedly demonstrated immense courage while being led by organisations whose political strategy subordinated them to forces protecting capitalist property and state power.

What is missing: Trotskyism

The absence of sustained engagement with the Trotskyist movement consequently becomes more conspicuous as the historical narrative approaches the 1930s. Trotskyism was not simply another radical current competing beside anarchism, Labourism, feminism or Stalinism. The Left Opposition, and later the Fourth International, arose from the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and Stalinism’s abandonment of socialist internationalism. This had direct implications for every major political question in the latter part of Rosenberg’s book: fascism, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front, the Spanish Revolution, imperialism, and the approach of another world war.

One need not convert a London walking guide into a history of the Fourth International. But once a book seeks not simply to identify places but to explain radical political traditions, suppressing or marginalising conflicts over revolutionary programme becomes consequential. Without those conflicts, Stalinism risks appearing as merely another component of the broader radical tradition. It was far more historically significant than that.

Brick Lane and the extension beyond 1939

The addition of“Battleground Brick Lane 1970s” is therefore particularly interesting. It breaks the earlier tendency for Rosenberg’s narrative to terminate around the Second World War and carries the geography of struggle into London’s later history. That is a valuable development because migration changed but did not end the political character of the East End. The location that had earlier witnessed the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers became associated with later struggles involving newer migrant communities.

Placing those experiences within the same geographical landscape carries considerable historical power. The danger, however, remains that the concept of radical continuity replaces political differentiation. Successive populations certainly confronted discrimination and racist mobilisation. But the organisations, programmes and international political conditions within which they fought changed profoundly. Continuity of struggle should not be confused with continuity of politics.

Rosenberg and Corbynism

The project’s political standpoint becomes particularly apparent in Rosenberg’s own retrospective account of the book’s history. Writing about the third edition in November 2026, Rosenberg recalled that Jeremy Corbyn was one of the speakers at the launch of the original edition in 2015. He describes Corbyn’s subsequent entry into the Labour leadership contest as heralding “one of the most exciting and hopeful periods in Labour’s post-war history” and notes that enthusiasm for earlier radicals increased when Corbyn became Labour leader, with what Rosenberg calls a “solid mandate for radical change”.

This is politically revealing. Corbynism represented an attempt to channel the widespread opposition created by years of austerity back through the Labour Party. Its essential proposition was that Labour could be reclaimed and transformed through mass membership and pressure from below. The fate of this project cannot be treated as external to the political lessons of Rebel Footprints. If history is invoked to demonstrate what mobilisation can accomplish, it is equally necessary to examine what happens when mobilisation remains politically imprisoned within organisations defending the existing state. The critical historical issue is therefore not simply that movements need courage, organisation or pressure from below. British labour history has all three. The issue is political independence.

History from below and the problem of leadership

The book shares many strengths with the tradition usually described as history from below. It turns attention away from monarchs, prime ministers and generals and towards people whose experiences were routinely excluded from official history. That intellectual achievement should not be diminished. But there is a danger in transforming history from below into history only from below.

The working class does not make history under circumstances of its own choosing. Spontaneous struggle does not automatically provide the political programme needed to overcome capitalism. Workers encounter existing parties, trade unions, bureaucracies and ideologies. Different tendencies struggle consciously for leadership. Consequently, leadership is itself a historical question. Why did revolutionary opportunities end in defeat? Why did reformist organisations acquire authority? Why did Communist parties that originated under the impact of October become defenders of Stalinism? Why did organisations created by workers come to police workers’ struggles? These questions cannot be answered simply by reconstructing mobilisation, however sympathetically or vividly. The working class requires historical memory, but memory without political analysis can become commemoration.

The continuing value of Rebel Footprints

None of this diminishes the usefulness of Rosenberg’s achievement. The fact that the third edition exists at all indicates the continuing appetite for histories different from those supplied by official heritage culture. A contemporary favourable assessment describes the walks as a form of public “history from below” that makes the histories of ordinary people accessible through the city itself. Readers should use the book exactly in that spirit.

Walk Fleet Street and Clerkenwell. Walk Bow and Whitechapel. Walk Bloomsbury, Hackney, Battersea, Soho, Poplar, Bermondsey, Cable Street and Brick Lane. Look behind the expensive apartments, redeveloped warehouses and commercial façades. Recover the city inhabited by generations who refused to accept the conditions imposed upon them. But then ask the questions that the landscape itself cannot answer. Why were their victories limited? Why were reforms reversed? Why did organisations built through working-class sacrifice accommodate themselves to capitalism? Why did socialist internationalism come into conflict with Labourism and Stalinism? And why, after two centuries of struggle, does extraordinary private wealth continue to exist beside deprivation in one of the richest cities on earth? Those questions lead beyond the politics of radical remembrance.

Which footprints should be followed?

This is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of the third edition of Rebel Footprints. Rosenberg has produced something genuinely valuable: a counter-map of London. It is a city populated not simply by kings, financiers, property owners and politicians, but by workers, immigrants, women, socialists, democrats and anti-fascists. It reminds the reader that rights presented retrospectively as natural stages in Britain’s peaceful democratic development were secured through bitter struggles.

Yet history provides more than inspiration. It provides warnings. The working class’s greatest defeats did not occur because workers failed to struggle. Frequently they struggled heroically. Defeat resulted when courage and militancy were subordinated to political programmes incapable of challenging capitalist power. That is why revolutionary history cannot finally be reduced to a collection of inspiring rebellions.

London’s radical past contains competing political traditions, not a single progressive inheritance. Chartism, anarchism, parliamentary Labourism, Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism cannot simply be placed together beneath the heading of rebellion. Their differences concerned the most fundamental question of all: which class should hold political power?

In 2026 that question is far from historical. The physical London Rosenberg guides us through has changed drastically. But the social antagonism that produced earlier struggles has not disappeared. Enormous private fortunes coexist with workers struggling with housing and living costs. Migrants are again made scapegoats for crises they did not create. Nationalism is used to divide workers whose interests cross borders.

Rebel Footprints helps recover the memory of those who resisted previous manifestations of these forces. Its limitation is that memory is continually allowed to stand where political explanation is required. Readers should nevertheless take the book onto the streets. Walk the routes. Find the halls, estates, factories, meeting places and battlegrounds. Remember the matchwomen, Chartists, immigrant workers, suffragettes, tenants, socialists and anti-fascists. But their greatest legacy is not the proposition that protest eventually persuades society to become more progressive.

It is that every serious advance of the working class was secured through struggle against entrenched interests, while the decisive question remained the political programme under which that struggle was conducted. The footprints therefore point somewhere Rosenberg does not finally go. They point from protest towards the problem of political power, from radicalism towards socialism, and from the recovery of working-class history towards the necessity of revolutionary and internationalist leadership.

Bibliography

Book under review

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 3rd ed. Foreword by Michael Rosen. London: Pluto Press, 2026. 416 pp. ISBN 9780745351810. [plutobooks.com], [amazon.co.uk]

Earlier editions and related work

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 2nd ed. Foreword by Ash Sarkar. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Rosenberg, David. Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2011.

Further reading

Branson, Noreen. Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. London: Duckworth, 1975.

Lenin, V. I. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 1920.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. London: Longmans, 1931.

Piratin, Phil. Our Flag Stays Red. London: Thames Publications, 1948.

Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. London: Robert Anscombe, 1956.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Trotsky, Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle.”Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904).

“Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.”
Leon Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist (1934). [marxists.org]

The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface.” James P. Cannon, Theses on the American Revolution.

“The Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes at a critical turning point in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization.”

David North, An assessment of the decade of socialist revolution and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party, 11 August 2026. [wsws.org]

The New Yorker asks whether American socialism can survive its success. The real question is whether the working class can free itself from the Democratic Party, and from those who call themselves socialists to keep it there.

One week after the 2026 midterm elections, The New Yorker published an essay by Harvard historian Jill Lepore titled “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” Its subtitle states the thesis plainly: the American movement has often watched its ideas flourish while its organisations withered, and the question now is whether today’s resurgence will go the same way.

The framing is revealing, both for what it assumes and for what it leaves out. For the liberal establishment, the problem of socialism is one of institutional durability: membership rolls, mailing lists, and electoral machinery. Socialism is treated as a set of popular “ideas”, free buses, rent freezes and childcare, that drift into the mainstream, while the organisations that carried them fade away. This is presented as a tragic but natural cycle of American political life.

Marxists reject this framework from the outset. Socialism is not a menu of reforms that a capitalist party may or may not adopt. It is the programme for the working class to seize political power and reorganisation of economic life based on social need, not private profit. By that standard, the “success” The New Yorker invites its readers to contemplate is nothing of the kind.

Whose success?

The Nov. 3 midterms trigger the piece. Six candidates backed by the DSA have taken House seats, bringing the total number of self-described democratic socialists in Congress to eight (per CNBC). Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York; Katie Wilson is the mayor of Seattle. Current Affairs has called it ‘Socialism’s Moment’.

But all of these candidates ran as Democrats on the Democratic line, and all of them will be in a Democratic caucus. CNBC’s own report points out that the sheer size of the Democratic majority will severely limit the leverage any of them can exert. In other words, the ‘socialist’ wave has delivered its votes to a party of Wall Street, the military/intelligence complex and the war machine. This party has never been an independent vehicle for the working class’s political interests.

The same report actually makes a more telling point. DSA leaders claim they are having greater success with donors, including wealthy ones, as the organisation continues building its infrastructure ahead of 2028. That is the real measure of the “success” they are celebrating. It is not the growth of working-class consciousness or independent working-class organisation, but the successful integration of a middle-class political layer into the machinery of bourgeois politics.

The same exit poll found that 70% of voters feel the economic system is rigged in favour of the rich. That’s the actual state of play: a very real and growing antagonism towards capitalism exists among tens of millions of workers. The key question is what political outlook and what organisation will give that antagonism a form of conscious expression? DSA’s answer, ‘just vote Democrat,’ is designed to ensure that it never takes on an independent political form.

What really destroyed the organisations

The idea that socialist organisations in America ‘died out’ while their ideas survived is a complete liberal myth. It’s a myth which conveniently ignores the real political reasons for their demise. The SP of Eugene Debs, which pulled in nearly a million votes in 1912, wasn’t just dissolved by some inescapable law of American exceptionalism. It was crushed by state repression. Debs went to prison for anti-war activities. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were the tools of repression used against the anti-war movement, and the Palmer Raids and mass deportations came in the postwar period. Meanwhile, the SP was being torn apart by the impact of the Russian Revolution and the internal struggle between its revolutionary and reformist elements.

In the 1930s, the great industrial struggles that built the CIO, including Minneapolis, Toledo and Flint, demonstrated the immense social power of the American working class. Socialists, communists and other militants played decisive roles. Yet the Stalinised Communist Party, pursuing the Popular Front strategy dictated by Moscow, worked to subordinate this movement to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, whose members had played a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War.

Afterwards, trade unions purged militants and became instruments of Cold War anti-communism and labour-management collaboration. The tendency from which the modern DSA sprang (Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organising Committee, founded in 1973 and absorbed into DSA in 1982) was based on the idea of ‘realigning’ or ‘transforming’ the Democratic Party rather than creating an independent revolutionary party of the working class.

The lesson of this history is not that socialist organisations are inherently weak. It is that the constant subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics has repeatedly killed off the prospect of the working class ever becoming an independent political force. The social reforms that did survive (Social Security, labour rights, Medicare, etc.) were all concessions taken from American capitalism under the pressure of the times. They were not evidence of capitalism evolving into socialism. The fact that both Democrats and Republicans eventually rolled them back is the very definition of the opposite.

City Hall and the limits of “sewer socialism”

New York was the flagship of the new movement. Mamdani was elected on a platform of initiatives including fast and free buses, a rent freeze for rent-stabilised tenants, and universal childcare. In June, after appointing six of its nine members, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze one- and two-year stabilised leases from October 2026 to September 2027.

No worker will begrudge tenants a bit of relief from rising rents. It is important to be clear, though, that this is not socialism. A temporary freeze on rents in the regulated part of the market doesn’t change capitalist ownership of land, housing and finance. The property developers, landlords, banks, and other financial interests at the heart of the housing system remain exactly as they are.

Mamdani himself has referred to the municipal socialist tradition in Milwaukee and the so-called ‘sewer socialists’. That tradition was largely about efficient municipal administration and the provision of public services. Any improvements such policies may bring about remain within the realm of municipal reform. They don’t, in any way, eliminate capitalist property or transfer political power to the working class.

New York is still one of the great centres of world capitalism. No municipal administration, however well-intentioned in its reform programme, can transform the class relations institutionalised on Wall Street, since those relations go far beyond the municipal boundary and rest on ownership of the means of production.

This isn’t really a question of individual treachery or individual sincerity. It’s a question of programme. A movement that takes responsibility for administering capitalism has to operate within the economic, political, and legal framework of that administration. Eventually, workers’ interests will run up against the demands that finance, property, and the state make of that administration.

The historical experience of reformist governments internationally, from SYRIZA in Greece to ostensibly left administrations elsewhere, therefore demands serious examination. Winning office and possessing political power are not the same thing.

Ideas without a programme, organisation without independence

The New Yorker’s formula, ideas flourish while organisations wither, should therefore be turned on its head. The central problem is not that American socialists have been organisationally incapable of sustaining attractive reforms. It is that organisations claiming the socialist mantle have repeatedly rejected the working class’s political independence.

DSA is not an independent working-class political party. It operates overwhelmingly through the Democratic Party and organises electoral campaigns for candidates who stand within that party. This contradiction became especially stark during the 2022 railroad dispute, when Congress intervened and imposed a contract on rail workers, preventing a national strike.

An organisation cannot overcome this contradiction merely by increasing its membership, fundraising capacity or representation in elected institutions. Organisational growth and socialist political development are entirely different things. Indeed, under definite conditions the first can proceed at the expense of the second.

The question “Can socialism survive its success?” is therefore posed falsely. What may unquestionably survive is a political apparatus possessing elected representatives, campaign funds, professional staff and positions within existing institutions. But an organisation that grows by integrating itself ever more deeply into the capitalist political structure is not necessarily succeeding as a socialist movement. It may instead be abandoning the historical content of socialism while retaining its name.

What the discussion leaves out

A discussion of American socialism in November 2026 that confines itself to elections and organisational longevity necessarily passes over the decisive questions confronting the working class.

The first is war. American capitalism remains at the centre of an international system characterised by sharpening geopolitical conflicts and enormous military expenditures. Socialism cannot be reduced to domestic redistribution while foreign policy and militarism are treated as separate questions. Opposition to imperialist war belongs at the centre of a genuinely international socialist programme.

The second question is the defence of democratic rights. The growth of authoritarian forms of rule cannot be separated from extreme social inequality and the political crisis it generates. A ruling class confronted by growing social opposition increasingly regards democratic forms as obstacles to securing its interests. The defence of democratic rights therefore depends upon the independent mobilisation of the working class rather than confidence in the institutions or representatives of either capitalist party.

Third is the working class’s international character. Workers in New York and Seattle confront corporations, banks, financial markets and supply chains extending across national boundaries. Their conditions of life are inseparable from those of workers in London, São Paulo, Shenzhen and throughout the world economy. There is consequently no national, still less municipal, road to socialism.

Finally, there is the rank and file. The more significant development is not simply the election of a handful of politicians presenting themselves as democratic socialists but the emergence of struggles by workers against employers and, increasingly, against trade-union bureaucracies seeking to contain those struggles. Socialist politics must seek to develop the working class’s independent initiative and organisation. These are the conditions in which the socialist question is actually posed: not principally as the popularity of individual reforms, but as a question of class power.

The question that should be asked

The real question is not whether American socialism can survive its success. It is whether the American working class will break politically with the Democratic Party and construct its own revolutionary political leadership on an internationalist and socialist programme.

Widespread hostility to inequality, declining living standards, and the domination of political life by immense concentrations of wealth provide an objective basis for such a development. But hostility towards capitalism does not spontaneously become socialist consciousness. Nor will it reach socialism through the electoral structures of the Democratic Party, the fundraising apparatus of DSA or the administration of municipal reforms.

It requires the conscious assimilation of the strategic experiences of the American and international working class throughout the twentieth century, including the Russian Revolution, the degeneration of the Soviet Union, the rise of Stalinism, the Popular Front, fascism, the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities and the prolonged struggle waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism and reformism.

This is precisely what disappears when socialism is reduced to the history of organisations, policies and electoral cycles. The fundamental historical question is not why particular socialist organisations disappeared. It is what programme they fought for, what class interests they represented and, above all, what political relationship they established between the working class and the capitalist state. The New Yorker worries that socialist organisations may wither once again. The working class should draw a very different lesson from this history. It is time to build the organisation that will not.

Bibliography

Articles and reports

Guttenplan, D. D. “The Rapid-Fire Political Education of Zohran Mamdani.” The Nation, 12 May 2026.

Izaguirre, Anthony. “Rent Board Fulfils Mamdani’s Vow to Freeze the Rent on 1 Million NYC Apartments.” Associated Press, 25 June 2026.

Lepore, Jill. “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” The New Yorker, 9 November 2026.

“America Doesn’t Like Socialism, but the Candidates Keep Winning.” CNBC, 7 November 2026.

“Socialism’s Moment Is Here.” Current Affairs, 2026.

“NYC Rent Guidelines Board Final Vote.” NY1, 25 June 2026.

Books

Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad Press, 1972.

Harrington, Michael. Socialism. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.

Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.

Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program). 1938.

Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.

Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably assumed a more personal and political significance.

To dismantle a library is to excavate one’s own intellectual history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return. The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return. Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the 1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end, towards Marxism and Trotskyism.

I never assembled the library primarily for possession’s sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense. These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed, why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, but with the novel.

Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel

The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow. They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was considerable.

These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society. Sillitoe’s factory workers, Delaney’s Salford, Barstow’s West Riding and the lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers’s American South opened up experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers, television and the political establishment.

For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable. Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it could not resolve. Why were people’s lives organised in this way? Why did some possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did class determine so much about an individual’s possibilities?

The best of these novels registered the human consequences of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a century later, they remain on my shelves.

Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky’s History

Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted someone’s attention because two young Militant members were eventually dispatched to my door to recruit me.

My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant’s political perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.

The books survived my membership. Most remain in the library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the Stalinist Communist Party.

The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings entered history consciously.

The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky’s work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary consciousness and leadership.

The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October Revolution represented the working class’s conscious seizure of power under Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism. The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. Reading the History was therefore decisive in making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.

The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night

The library’s next major expansion came after I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

One of the largest single additions to my library came shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection. Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the surface.

Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria Joffe’s One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.

Such books matter because the struggle over historical memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian Revolution had been based.

A library containing this literature is therefore more than an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.

Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing

The library’s largest sustained expansion began with my studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point another strand of intellectual development became central: the seventeenth-century English Revolution.

I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical reading and writing.

The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution, the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.

But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval’s international significance?

Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism.

The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

My library’s expansion consequently followed the development of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and contemporary politics.

Books as the Material Record of a Political Development

Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant, the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.

False starts marked that journey. Some books were undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.

Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage

The most recent development introduces another element into this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all, from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance, competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they develop. The task is to understand both technology’s emancipatory potential and the class interests that determine its present use.

For an individual engaged in historical research, the possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for the political and historical understanding required to determine which relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social interests underlie competing interpretations.

After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did. The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an individual writer working largely alone.

The Library as a Working Archive

This is the significance of moving the library. Over the coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the website’s development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.

The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning has been contested.

What links them is not uniformity, because they contain writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint. What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000 books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of historical and political writing.

The journey that began with working-class novels read at Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares for what comes next.

The republication of a 1972 Soviet polemic against Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International provides an opportunity to reconsider the political function of anti-Trotskyism within Stalinist ideology and the historical fate of the bureaucracy that produced it. Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature was not simply an academic assessment of a rival political tendency. It was part of a broader campaign in which the Soviet bureaucracy sought to discredit Trotskyism and suppress the historical significance of the Left Opposition’s struggle against Stalinism. The persistence of such polemics decades after Trotsky’s assassination showed the bureaucracy’s continued sensitivity to a Marxist critique that challenged its claim to represent the political continuity of the October Revolution.

The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gives these arguments an additional historical significance. The bureaucracy that proclaimed Trotskyism politically bankrupt ultimately presided over the destruction of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism. Basmanov’s work should therefore be read today primarily as a document of Stalinist political ideology, revealing how the Soviet apparatus sought to answer an opposition whose analysis of bureaucracy, nationalism and the danger of capitalist restoration raised questions that official Soviet historiography could never satisfactorily resolve.

Who was Mikhail Basmanov?

Biographical information on Basmanov is surprisingly scarce in readily available sources. We can establish with greater certainty his political and literary role in the Soviet ideological apparatus. He was a specialist writer on Trotskyism, and his best-known work, Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature, was published in English by Moscow’s Progress Publishers in 1972 under the auspices of the CPSU Central Committee’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

The circumstances of the book’s production are particularly revealing. The publisher of the new edition describes Basmanov as a “professional in the genre” of Soviet anti-Trotskyist literature and connects the book with a 1971 directive by CPSU Central Committee Secretary Ponomarev calling for an ideological offensive against Trotskyism. Contemporary Trotskyism therefore cannot be approached simply as an academic historian’s independent scholarship. Its original title page explicitly identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU, while its chapters attack Trotsky, permanent revolution, the Fourth International and contemporary Trotskyist organisations from the standpoint of official Soviet ideology.

David North and the Stalinist falsification of Trotskyism

Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism becomes clearer when placed within the broader tradition of historical falsification examined by David North. North’s defence of Trotsky has repeatedly insisted that attacks upon Trotsky cannot be separated from the political struggle over the historical meaning of the October Revolution, the rise of Stalinism and the fate of the Soviet Union. His In Defence of Leon Trotsky, for example, challenges what he regards as the transmission of Stalinist distortions into contemporary historical writing. The WSWS presentation of the Russian edition described the book as a refutation of attacks by British historians upon Trotsky’s political and intellectual legacy and explicitly connected these controversies with the earlier Stalinist falsification of Soviet history. [wsws.org]

This provides an important framework within which to read Basmanov. The essential issue is not whether we can dismiss every factual assertion in Contemporary Trotskyism because its author wrote within the official Soviet ideological apparatus. The more profound question concerns the political method by which Trotskyism is defined. Rather than beginning with Trotsky’s programme and historical writings and examining their relationship to the major experiences of the twentieth-century working class, the Stalinist polemical tradition began by identifying the Soviet bureaucracy with socialism. Opposition to that bureaucracy could consequently be represented as opposition to the Soviet Union and, ultimately, as counter-revolution.

North’s writings approach the question from the opposite standpoint. In a 2024 speech commemorating Trotsky’s exile on Büyükada, he situated Trotsky’s historical importance particularly in relation to the defeat of the German working class, the rise of Nazism and Stalinist betrayals in Germany, France and Spain. He argued that understanding these historical defeats remains necessary to confronting contemporary political problems. This emphasis on historical experience exposes the fundamental weakness of Basmanov’s method. Trotskyism must be judged not by the denunciatory vocabulary of official Soviet ideology but by examining the policies for which Trotsky and his opponents actually fought. [wsws.org]

The contrast became still more important after 1991. The bureaucracy that had declared Trotskyism historically bankrupt presided over the Soviet Union’s final crisis and dissolution. The WSWS account of the Russian publication of In Defence of Leon Trotsky explicitly links the Soviet Union’s fate to the historical struggle between Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and Stalinism, arguing that contemporary political questions in Russia cannot be understood apart from that history. Whatever judgement one ultimately reaches about North’s political conclusions, this is a question that any retrospective defence of the official Soviet attack on Trotskyism must answer. [wsws.org]

In this context, republishing Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature offers more than antiquarian interest. The Soviet attack on Trotsky did not disappear with the state apparatus that produced it. Stalinist distortions of Trotsky and the Russian Revolution continued to find expression long after the USSR’s dissolution. Basmanov’s book, now republished with a critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, deserves attention because it preserves, in unusually concentrated form, the political methods the Soviet bureaucracy used to discredit Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International.

The book’s historical provenance is unmistakable. Contemporary Trotskyism appeared in English from Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1972 and carried on its title page the attribution “Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU”. Its chapters announce the political character of the work before the argument has properly begun: “How the Trotskyites Permanently Fought Against the Revolution”, “A Scornful Attitude to the Peasantry”, “The Ideological Collapse of Trotskyism”, and “How the ‘Fourth International’ Was Hammered Together and What Came of It”.

This was not history written from an academic distance. It was political propaganda produced by an official institution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against the revolutionary tendency whose leading representatives had been persecuted and physically annihilated by the Stalinist bureaucracy during the preceding decades. The circumstances surrounding its production underline this character. The publisher of the new edition states that, in Kommunist no. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, called for exposing Trotskyism’s supposed connections with anti-communism and right- and left-wing opportunism. It describes Basmanov’s volume as executing that political directive “at book length”. Contemporary Trotskyism’s interest, therefore, lies far less in what it can tell readers about Trotskyism than in what it reveals about Stalinism.

Why 1972?

The date of publication is essential to understanding the book. Basmanov was writing in the aftermath of a period of enormous international political upheaval. The revolutionary crisis in France in May-June 1968, the struggles surrounding the Prague Spring, mass international opposition to the Vietnam War, and the political radicalisation of a new generation transformed the political atmosphere in Europe and beyond.

Even Basmanov could not simply ignore this process. The opening of his book describes the period as one of profound revolutionary change, specifically citing intensifying class struggle in advanced capitalist countries and the emergence of students and parts of the intelligentsia as active political forces. The new publisher draws attention to an even more revealing feature of the original. Basmanov himself acknowledged that, after supposedly being defeated during the 1920s and 1930s, Trotskyist movements began to revive from the 1950s onward. The publisher argues that the intensity of the Soviet polemic reflected the growth of the Fourth International and other radical tendencies among workers and students after 1968.

This contradiction runs through the whole enterprise. The Soviet bureaucracy insisted that Trotskyism was politically bankrupt, historically discredited and without a significant social base. Yet it continued to devote considerable ideological resources to combating it. The very existence of Contemporary Trotskyism is therefore evidence that the bureaucracy did not regard Trotsky’s political heritage with the indifference appropriate to a genuinely dead tendency.

Basmanov’s subsequent work makes the anxiety still clearer. In 1973 the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow published his Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, an English-language pamphlet of roughly 100 pages dealing explicitly with Trotskyism, political activity and youth. The title itself tells us something important. The bureaucracy was no longer merely conducting retrospective arguments about disputes from the 1920s. It was concerned with the influence of Trotskyist ideas upon a contemporary younger generation.

The method of the Stalinist school of falsification

The organisational structure of Contemporary Trotskyism displays the characteristic method of official Soviet anti-Trotskyism. Permanent revolution becomes an alleged rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the peasantry. Opposition to the Stalinist programme of socialism in one country becomes disbelief in socialism itself. The Soviet bureaucracy identifies opposition to its diplomatic manoeuvres and political betrayals as hostility to the Soviet Union.

The table of contents demonstrates the procedure particularly clearly. Basmanov moves from supposed Trotskyist hostility to the peasantry to the “rejection” of socialism in one country, the alleged ideological collapse of Trotskyism and finally the claim that contemporary Trotskyism was undermining the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.

The method is significant. Political disagreements are not analysed according to their actual historical content. Instead, opposition to the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy is progressively identified with opposition to socialism itself. The bureaucratic leadership is thereby transformed from a historically specific political stratum into the personification of socialism, and criticism of the bureaucracy becomes by definition counter-revolutionary. This ideological formula had justified persecuting the Left Opposition long before Basmanov wrote his book.

Consequently, this framework pushed aside the historical questions that might have discredited it. What was the social basis of bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union? Why did Lenin, in the final period of his political life, express increasing alarm over the growth of bureaucratic tendencies? What political meaning did the theory of socialism in one country have, which had never formed part of the Bolshevik Party programme before 1924? What explained the catastrophic policies pursued by the Communist International in Britain, China and Germany? And why did the Soviet leadership undertake the physical extermination of so large a section of the revolutionary generation that had led the October Revolution?

These questions lead directly to writings that official Soviet polemics could not answer through historical investigation alone: Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, his writings on Germany and the rise of fascism, and, above all, The Revolution Betrayed.

The fundamental political significance of The Revolution Betrayed lay in Trotsky’s attempt to explain the Soviet Union’s contradictions from a Marxist standpoint. He rejected both the Stalinist identification of the bureaucracy with socialism and the claim that the October Revolution had created another form of capitalism. He instead characterised the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state in which the social gains represented by nationalised property coexisted with a parasitic bureaucratic caste exercising political power. Whether that analysis was correct is a historical and political question requiring serious examination. Basmanov instead begins from the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy and evaluates its opponents accordingly.

The shadow of the Moscow Trials

A deeper historical continuity is involved. Basmanov’s 1972 language was less murderous than that of the Great Terror, but the basic political logic had changed far less than the softer terminology suggested. Trotskyism continued to be presented not as a Marxist tendency whose political analysis might be right or wrong, but as a fundamentally anti-revolutionary phenomenon serving forces hostile to socialism.

That accusation was central to the Stalinist campaign against the Left Opposition. During the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, former leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were accused of extraordinary conspiracies and subsequently executed. Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, was made the central political defendant in absentia.

The twentieth-century history of Stalinism therefore cannot be separated from the history of anti-Trotskyism. Opposition to Trotsky was not one ideological feature among many. It played an essential role in destroying the political memory of the October Revolution and establishing a new official version of Soviet history in which Stalin’s emergence appeared as the legitimate continuation of Bolshevism.

The contradiction became particularly striking after Nikita Khrushchev denounced parts of Stalin’s record. Once it was conceded that crimes on an enormous scale had been committed, an obvious question followed. What of the political opposition that had fought the bureaucracy before those crimes reached their height? Answering that question required reconsidering the history of the Left Opposition itself.

What Basmanov cannot explain

Basmanov’s book’s decisive weakness follows from its political purpose. To acknowledge Trotskyism as a genuine Marxist opposition to bureaucratic domination would have required reopening the basic political struggles through which the Stalinist regime consolidated itself. This problem extends beyond Trotsky personally. The history of the Fourth International after his assassination posed equally difficult questions for Soviet apologetics.

Particularly important was the 1953 conflict within the Fourth International associated with the tendency headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The issue was not simply one more organisational split among left-wing groups. At the centre of the conflict was a debate over the historical role of Stalinism and other bureaucratic and nationalist formations.

For an official Soviet polemicist, treating all these conflicting tendencies as undifferentiated “Trotskyism” was politically convenient. The distinctions disappeared, and with them disappeared the awkward fact that one of the central conflicts within postwar Trotskyism concerned precisely whether revolutionary Marxists should adapt themselves politically to the Stalinist bureaucracies and allied movements.

The homogenisation of politically hostile tendencies therefore performs an ideological function. It lets Basmanov construct “Trotskyism” as a single counter-revolutionary phenomenon rather than examine the historical struggles through which different movements claiming the Trotskyist inheritance evolved.

A surprisingly useful primary source

However, Basmanov’s work contains an irony that the publisher of the new edition itself emphasises. Unlike many polemics in this genre, Contemporary Trotskyism quotes extensively from the publications of the movements it attacks. The publisher calls it unusually well documented for a Soviet source on the post-1968 radical left, noting its references to publications from several countries.

This gives the book a secondary value quite different from the one its author intended. It can be read as evidence of what the Soviet bureaucracy monitored, which tendencies it considered threatening, and how its ideological institutions tried to categorise developments on the international left.

The book is therefore potentially illuminating when approached against the grain. The reader should ask not merely, “What does Basmanov say about the Trotskyists?” but “Why was an institution of the CPSU commissioning and publishing this argument in 1972?” Seen in this way, the polemical excess becomes historical evidence.

History’s verdict

The greatest problem confronting Basmanov’s argument emerged after he published his book. Trotsky insisted that bureaucratic rule did not provide a stable path to socialism. His conception of political revolution stemmed from the contradiction between the nationalised property relations produced by the October Revolution and the bureaucracy’s political domination. In his analysis, defending the social foundations created by October required the Soviet working class to remove the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy.

The ultimate fate of the Soviet Union therefore poses a decisive historical question: which analysis more penetratingly captured Soviet society’s contradictions, the bureaucracy’s apologetics or the Marxist opposition to it? The state whose political invincibility was assumed throughout official Soviet literature disappeared in 1991. The CPSU ceased to rule. The Soviet Union was dissolved, and capitalist property relations were restored across the former USSR.

This does not mean that every prediction made by every tendency describing itself as Trotskyist was vindicated. Nor does the collapse of the USSR automatically settle every controversy over Soviet history. But it does require the central claims of official Soviet ideology to be subjected to an accounting that Contemporary Trotskyism, for obvious chronological reasons, could never make. The bureaucratic order Basmanov defended did not provide a stable and irreversible transition to communism. Its political institutions proved incapable of preventing capitalism’s restoration.

This is why Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin’s work matters in any retrospective assessment of Basmanov. In his multi-volume Was There an Alternative?, Rogovin reconstructed the history of the Left Opposition and the struggle against Stalinism as a real political conflict rather than treating the bureaucracy’s ascendancy as the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. The very title posed the historical question that decades of official Soviet historiography had sought to suppress: was Stalinism the unavoidable development of Bolshevism, or did a Marxist alternative exist?

From this perspective, the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be relegated to a dispute between personalities or rival factions. It concerned the international strategy of the socialist revolution, the relationship between Soviet economic development and world revolution, the nature of socialist democracy and, ultimately, whether the bureaucratic regime would defend or undermine the social foundations established in October 1917.

The new introduction

The 2026 edition’s distinguishing feature is Dmitry Chasovennikov’s introduction. The available evidence here requires an important correction to the assumption that the reissue straightforwardly represents an attempt to revive Basmanov’s political standpoint. The publisher explicitly describes the new introduction as “written from inside the tradition the book sets out to bury” and presents Basmanov’s book as “Moscow’s book-length answer to the post-1968 growth of the Fourth International”. Amazon reproduces substantially the same description, characterising the original as a Soviet attack on Trotsky, the Fourth International and the far left. [amazon.co.uk]

That substantially changes how the republication should be evaluated. On the evidence available from the publisher, the book is being presented not simply as a restored Stalinist polemic for contemporary use but as a historically situated document accompanied by a critical introduction. Nevertheless, one important question remains that the publisher’s promotional description alone cannot settle: how far does Chasovennikov’s introduction pursue the historical implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the archival record of Stalinist repression, and the political disputes inside the Fourth International? Without the complete text of the introduction, it would be unjustified to attribute specific answers to him.

The responsible criticism, therefore, is not to pretend that the new editor endorses Basmanov. The more interesting question is what contemporary readers can learn from republishing the book as an historical document.

Why republish it now?

On that basis, there is a legitimate reason to make Contemporary Trotskyism available again. Stalinist anti-Trotskyism deserves historical study. So do the institutions that manufactured it, the political vocabulary they employed and the historical episodes they systematically distorted or suppressed.

Indeed, the publisher’s framing unintentionally makes the book particularly suitable for such a reading. It notes that Basmanov’s polemic followed Ponomarev’s 1971 directive, stresses the political circumstances of its appearance, and explicitly characterises the volume as a response to the revival of revolutionary currents after the late 1960s.

Read critically, therefore, Contemporary Trotskyism can illuminate a significant episode in the ideological history of the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet bureaucracy understood the challenge revolutionary movements posed to its left and how it sought to inoculate Communist Party members and sympathisers against Trotsky’s political legacy. But precisely because of this, the book should never be read in isolation.

Readers seeking to understand these controversies should place Basmanov alongside the principal documents produced by the people he attacks. They should read Trotsky on permanent revolution, the Communist International, the German catastrophe, the Soviet bureaucracy and the founding of the Fourth International. They should investigate the Moscow Trials and the subsequent historical and documentary record. They should examine the conflicts within the Fourth International rather than accepting an omnibus category called “Trotskyism”.Above all, they should compare the rival historical perspectives with what actually happened.

A museum piece, but an instructive one

The most striking feature of Contemporary Trotskyism today is the disappearance of the political world from which it spoke with such institutional confidence. Basmanov wrote from within an enormous state and party apparatus that declared itself the authoritative embodiment of Marxism-Leninism and treated Trotskyism as a defeated deviation relegated to history. Yet the CPSU and the Soviet Union are themselves gone.

The political questions Trotsky fought over have not disappeared with them. The relationship between nationalism and international socialism, the political independence of the working class, the dangers of bureaucracy, the character of revolutionary leadership and the relationship between socialist revolution and democracy remain indispensable questions for anyone attempting to understand the twentieth century or the crisis of contemporary capitalism.

That is the final irony surrounding Basmanov’s resurrection. His book sought to demonstrate that Trotskyism belonged to the past. Half a century later, Basmanov’s polemic returns primarily as a historical artefact from a vanished political apparatus.

The new edition can therefore perform a useful service, provided it is read critically and historically. Approach contemporary Trotskyism not as an authoritative guide to Trotsky or the Fourth International, but as a primary source for understanding how the Soviet bureaucracy represented its Marxist opponents in the last decades of its existence.

And there is an appropriate way to test its claims. Read Basmanov. Then read Trotsky. Read the Left Opposition documents and the political conflicts within the Fourth International. Read the archival scholarship produced after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Finally, set the conflicting analyses against the history that followed.

That historical comparison transforms this republished polemic from an attack on Trotskyism into an unintended document of the political order against which Trotskyism fought.

Bibliography

Primary text

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. The digitised original identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU and confirms the 1972 English printing. [archive.org]

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: With a New Critical Introduction. Introduction by Chasovennikov. Progress Publishers Library, 2026. The electronic edition is listed as appearing in September 2026. [progresspu…ishers.org], [fnac.com]

Basmanov, Mikhail. Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1973. [openlibrary.org]

Trotsky and the Left Opposition

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1928.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution. 1938.

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

Stalinism and the historical struggle over Trotskyism

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. Oxford University Press, 1954.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. Oxford University Press, 1959.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. Oxford University Press, 1963.

Rogovin, Vadim. Was There an Alternative? Multi-volume study of the Left Opposition, Stalinism and the political struggles in the Soviet Union.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.

Further reading

Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.

Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin. 1937.

Sedov, Leon. The Red Book on the Moscow Trials. 1936.

John Kelly’s Trade Unions and Socialist Politics appeared in 1988, three years after the defeat of the British miners’ strike and amid the organised labour movement’s continuing retreat under the Thatcher government. It targeted a growing body of opinion among left academics, Communist Party intellectuals, and trade union officials who argued that changes in the working-class composition, declining trade union membership, and Thatcherism’s electoral victories had rendered the traditional politics of class struggle obsolete. Verso’s description confirms that Kelly explicitly challenged claims that unions were in chronic decline or had exhausted their progressive potential, calling such arguments based on “poor sociology and bad history”.

Kelly sets himself two fundamental questions. What kinds of trade union strategy are most likely to develop political class consciousness among workers? And what role could such strategies play in a transition to socialism? These are serious questions, and Kelly treats them with a seriousness absent from much of the literature generated by the demoralised British left of the late 1980s. The book is extensively researched and draws on historical material, strike statistics, surveys, and the writings of classical Marxists. Yet the volume’s fundamental weakness is that it keeps these questions within the political horizons of the existing trade union apparatus and the Labour Party. Nearly four decades later, the fate of these organisations provides an objective test of the perspective advanced in 1988. That test has not favoured Kelly’s conclusions.

Kelly’s argument

The book examines the classical Marxist literature on trade unionism before considering the political and strategic problems confronting British unions during the 1980s. Kelly begins with Marx and Engels, for whom unions were both an elementary organisational expression of workers’ resistance to capital and a potential means for broader class consciousness to emerge. He then considers Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902), with its argument concerning the limitations of spontaneous trade union consciousness, before turning to Antonio Gramsci and his discussion of trade unionism and the factory councils.

Kelly’s sympathies lean heavily toward Rosa Luxemburg. In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), Luxemburg examined how mass struggles affect the working class’s political consciousness and organisation. Kelly draws on historical evidence from strike movements to argue that participation in industrial struggle can transform workers’ consciousness. This argument is central to his response to those who, during the 1980s, increasingly depicted the working class as fragmented, politically quiescent, and incapable of collective action. Verso’s account of the book similarly stresses Kelly’s use of empirical evidence to support Luxemburg’s emphasis on the transformative consequences of participation in trade union struggles.

From this foundation, Kelly conducts a two-front polemic. Against the Eurocommunist and “new realist” currents associated with Marxism Today, which drew ever more pessimistic conclusions about the working class’s historical prospects, Kelly argues that the difficulties confronting trade unions in the 1980s were neither historically unprecedented nor evidence that collective working-class organisation had reached its end. His criticism of this standpoint remains one of the book’s strongest elements. The labour movement was experiencing a serious defeat. Still, defeat is not the same thing as the disappearance of the working class or the abolition of the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

On the other flank, however, Kelly challenges conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy, particularly those associated with tendencies to his left. He opposes the claim that full-time trade union officials constitute a distinctive conservative bureaucracy that systematically seeks to contain the struggles of the workers they nominally represent. Drawing on empirical studies, Kelly argues that officials may, under certain circumstances, be as militant as, or even more militant than, sections of their membership. The weakness here lies less in his evidence than in the political conclusion he draws from it. Comparing degrees of individual militancy cannot settle the Marxist critique of trade union bureaucracy. It concerns the apparatus’s objective social position and political function within capitalist society.

Kelly’s strategic conclusions follow from this approach. He examines corporatist arrangements between governments, employers and union organisations and considers the possibilities for a more class-conscious trade union movement capable of placing political pressure upon the state. His ultimate perspective nevertheless remains centred upon militant trade unionism combined with a Labour Party committed to radical economic reform. The democratic road to socialism comes with qualifications, but it remains recognisably within the political traditions of the British Labour left.

The missing question: the unions’ programme

Kelly’s book is strongest when it challenges the new realists’ pessimism. Workers had not lost their capacity for collective struggle. The miners demonstrated this with extraordinary force in 1984-85, sustaining a year-long confrontation with a government that mobilised the capitalist state’s resources against them. The strike therefore never raised a deficiency of courage or militancy among miners. It was the political isolation of their struggle.

The miners’ defeat poses a problem that Kelly’s theoretical framework struggles to answer. A trade union bureaucracy cannot be adequately defined through the subjective qualities of individual officials. A bureaucrat can speak militantly, support particular strikes, and occasionally find himself pushed into conflict with employers, yet he remains fundamentally distinct from the membership in social and political terms. The decisive issue is how the trade union apparatus relates to capitalist property relations, the national state, and the political organisations that defend the existing social order.

Trotsky’s unfinished 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” matters precisely here. Trotsky sought to link the development of monopoly capitalism to the tendency toward closer integration of the trade union apparatus with the capitalist state. He did not conclude from the bureaucracy’s conservatism that revolutionaries should abandon workers organised in trade unions. Rather, he saw the revolutionary party’s political independence from the apparatus as essential precisely because large sections of the working class remained organised within the unions.

Kelly’s presentation of Lenin and Luxemburg tends to blur this issue by presenting their differences too strongly through the categories of pessimism and optimism towards spontaneous industrial struggle. Lenin argued that workers were not incapable of militant struggle, nor that economic struggles could never contribute to political radicalisation. The essential point was that spontaneous struggle alone does not resolve the problem of socialist political consciousness and revolutionary leadership. The working class encounters not merely the employers but an entire network of political institutions and ideological pressures through which bourgeois society reproduces itself.

This distinction becomes decisive when Kelly moves from empirical evidence to strategic conclusions. His alternative to the demoralisation of the new realists is ultimately not to build an independent revolutionary leadership but to make the established relationship between the unions and the Labour Party more militant. This is the central limitation of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Kelly correctly insists that the working class retains an enormous capacity for struggle. Still, he does not adequately confront the possibility that the existing organisations claiming to represent that class had themselves become increasingly important mechanisms for subordinating workers’ struggles to the requirements of British capitalism.

The verdict of history

In the decades after Kelly’s book was published, this question gained an importance that 1988 could only partly have anticipated. The globalisation of capitalist production placed immense pressure upon nationally based trade union programmes. Corporations increasingly organised production across borders, while unions remained institutionally and politically tied to the national state. The old reformist perspective, which held that union pressure on national employers and Labour governments could produce an indefinite succession of improvements, became increasingly untenable.

Kelly’s own later scholarship continued to engage extensively with these problems. Rethinking Industrial Relations developed a mobilisation approach to industrial relations and collective action, and Kelly later revisited that work in a 2018 article examining conceptual and empirical questions that had arisen since its publication. His later research also examined union revitalisation, organising strategies, social partnership, and strike activity. His academic profile identifies industrial conflict, trade unions, and union organising as subjects associated with this work.

This later development matters because mobilisation theory addresses a key problem: how grievances acquire a collective character and become organised action. Yet, from a Marxist standpoint, it does not, by itself, resolve the more fundamental political question posed by Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Explaining why workers mobilise is not the same as explaining the political role of the organisations through which they mobilise, nor does it determine which political programme their struggles should pursue.

The British strike wave of 2022-23 demonstrated the enduring relevance of this distinction. Rail workers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and other sections of the working class entered into major struggles over wages and conditions. The eruption of these conflicts vindicated a key aspect of Kelly’s polemic against those who had written off collective working-class struggle during the 1980s. But industrial militancy did not automatically resolve the question of political strategy and leadership. Lenin’s central problem, identified more than a century earlier, remained: what political perspective should guide the struggles generated by the objective antagonism between workers and capital?

Consequently, the historical fate of Kelly’s argument is ironic. Against the “new realists”, he was right to insist that the working class had not disappeared and that trade unions still had the capacity for collective action. But the labour movement’s subsequent history showed that these observations alone were insufficient. The more fundamental question was whether organisations rooted in national reformism could provide a progressive way forward under conditions of globally integrated capitalist production.

From Trade Unions and Socialist Politics to mobilisation theory

Kelly’s subsequent intellectual development makes Trade Unions and Socialist Politics particularly interesting in retrospect. His later Rethinking Industrial Relations shifted the analytical emphasis towards mobilisation, collectivism and the processes through which workers become involved in collective action. Kelly returned to that work in “Rethinking Industrial Relations revisited”, describing the later article as an examination of the origins and consequences of the earlier book and of conceptual and empirical questions raised subsequently.

His wider work on union revitalisation likewise examined the organisational possibilities confronting unions in a changing economic environment. Union Organisation and Activity, edited with Paul Willman, addressed union organising, statutory recognition, public-sector union strategies, partnership agreements, and the barriers existing union structures may pose to revitalisation. This provides an important bridge between the 1988 arguments and Kelly’s subsequent industrial-relations scholarship.

Yet continuity matters as much as development. Whether the analytical language is socialist politics, mobilisation, organising or revitalisation, the decisive unresolved issue concerns the political character of trade unionism itself. Unions cannot be understood solely as mechanisms through which grievances become collective action. Their leadership pursues definite programmes, operates within definite institutional relationships, and responds to pressures generated by its position between labour, employers, and the capitalist state.

This is ultimately why Kelly’s examination of the classical Marxist controversy cannot be resolved by industrial-relations sociology alone. The question is political. Under conditions of globally integrated production. At the same time, the trade unions remain nationally organised, can the existing apparatus become the vehicle for an international socialist struggle against capital, or does its programme bind workers ever more closely to national economic competitiveness and the capitalist state?

Conclusion

Trade Unions and Socialist Politics deserves to be read. Kelly’s critique of pessimistic currents that declared the working class historically exhausted contained an important element of truth, and his insistence on the transformative potential of collective struggle stood in sharp contrast to the increasingly fashionable abandonment of class politics during the 1980s. The empirical seriousness of his work distinguishes it from much of the superficial theorising produced during that period.

But the book’s greatest significance today lies in the contradiction at its centre. Kelly correctly defended the working class’s continued capacity for collective struggle but underestimated the political problem posed by the organisations that mediated those struggles. Workers’ defeats cannot be explained simply by insufficient mobilisation, unfavourable economic conditions, or variations in membership militancy. They raise questions of organisation, programme and political leadership.

Read nearly four decades after its publication, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics poses a problem more clearly than it solves. The issue is not whether the working class can fight. Repeated eruptions of class struggle have answered that question. The fundamental question is whether workers can advance through organisations whose political perspective remains subordinate to national reformism and the capitalist state.

The alternative is not political passivity or withdrawal from workers already organised within trade unions. It is the struggle for the working class’s political independence from the bureaucracy, combined with the development of democratic organisations through which workers can exercise direct control over their struggles and link them internationally. From this standpoint, rank-and-file committees are not simply a militant supplement to the existing apparatus but an organisational expression of a fundamentally different political orientation, based on the international unity and political independence of the working class.

That is the central question Trade Unions and Socialist Politics raised in 1988 but could not resolve. The intervening decades have made its resolution more urgent, not less.

Bibliography

Primary text

Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.

Classical Marxist sources

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920. Edited by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Lenin, V. I. What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902). In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). London: Bookmarks, 1986.

Marx, Karl. “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present and Future.” Resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, Geneva Congress, 1866.

Trotsky, Leon. “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940). In Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969.

Kelly’s later work on trade unions and industrial relations

Kelly, John. Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge, 1998. Kelly subsequently revisited the arguments of this book in 2018. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly. “Union Revitalisation Strategies in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 1 (2003): 7–24. [scholar.google.com]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly, eds. Varieties of Unionism: Strategies for Union Revitalisation in a Globalising Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [scholar.google.com]

Kelly, John, and Paul Willman, eds. Union Organisation and Activity. London: Routledge, 2004. The volume examines organising, recognition, partnership, public-sector unionism and union revitalisation. [routledge.com]

Kelly, John. Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform. London: Routledge, 2010. John Kelly’s ORCID record lists the work among his publications. [orcid.org]

Kelly, John. “Rethinking Industrial Relations Revisited.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 39, no. 4 (2018): 701–709. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Related works

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.

Hyman, Richard. Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism. London: Pluto Press, 1971.

Kelly, John. Labour and the Unions. London: Verso, 1987.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.

Contemporary reviews

Grimshaw, Bruce J. Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. Hummer, no. 24.

Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December 1989).

Published by Verso on 27 October 2026, Ewan Gibbs’s An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class sets itself an important historical and political task. Verso describes it as a social history of the British working class since 1945, extending “from the picket lines of the Miners’ Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today”. Through first-hand testimony, the book follows the transformation of a class once concentrated in mines, shipyards, and other centres of heavy industry into one dispersed across call centres, warehouses, and the gig economy. Its culminating question is explicitly political: “who now speaks for labour?”

That question could hardly be more urgent. The old organisations that claimed for generations to represent the working class have undergone a protracted collapse. The Labour Party has moved ever further from the reformist programme it was historically identified with, while the trade-union bureaucracy increasingly functions as an apparatus for containing workers’ struggles. The destruction of manufacturing employment, the privatisation of state industries, the erosion of social provision and the growth of precarious employment have transformed the social landscape in which millions live.

Gibbs brings considerable knowledge to this subject. He is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and describes his research interests as encompassing energy, industry, work and protest. His earlier book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland, examined the decline of deep coal mining in Scotland and its consequences for work, communities, memory, class and nationhood. His subsequent research has extended into the political economy of energy and the problems associated with industrial transition.

The empirical virtues of this work should not be dismissed. Verso stresses the prominence Gibbs gives to first-hand accounts, while Rhian E. Jones praises the book specifically for “letting its subjects speak for themselves”. The recollections of miners, engineers and workers from communities devastated by industrial closure constitute important historical evidence. Such testimony preserves experiences that would otherwise be submerged beneath official statistics and the complacent narratives of politicians who have treated deindustrialisation as the unavoidable price of economic modernisation.

But the preservation of experience does not by itself provide a historical explanation. History must establish the relationship between experience and the social forces that produced it. It must explain not merely what happened, but why, which political forces intervened, what programmes they advanced, and what alternatives existed. It is precisely here that the concept of the “unmaking” of the British working class raises fundamental problems.

From the “making” to the “unmaking” of the working class

The title consciously echoes E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. The intellectual ancestry of the argument is made especially clear by Gibbs’s 2019 essay, “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis”. There he defined the “unmaking” primarily through the atrophy of what he called “Labourism”: the political and institutional world centred on organised labour and its attachment to the Labour Party. He linked this process to deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, the demise of collective action, and the political demoralisation visible in former industrial areas.

This is an important starting point because the decline of “Labourism” is not identical to the disappearance of the working class. The conflation of the two contains the central theoretical difficulty. The working class is not defined by living in a mining village, wearing overalls, possessing a particular regional accent or belonging to a trade union. It is defined fundamentally by its relationship to the means of production. Workers who do not own significant productive property must sell their labour power to live. Changes in technology, occupation and geography can profoundly alter the forms through which class consciousness develops without abolishing the underlying class relation.

Indeed, Verso’s own description of An Injury to All illustrates the contradiction. It describes a class once “forged in mines and shipyards” becoming one spread across call centres and gig-economy applications. But this is not, strictly speaking, the disappearance of the working class. It is a transformation in the occupational structure and geographical concentration of wage labour. What has been shattered is something different: an historically specific form of working-class organisation and consciousness that grew alongside nationally regulated capitalism and became politically subordinated to the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy.

The distinction is decisive. If the decline of mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking and large-scale manufacturing automatically meant the decline of the working class, then the pessimistic conclusions associated with post-industrial sociology might follow. But if capitalist restructuring destroyed certain concentrations of workers while simultaneously producing new ones, the historical problem changes entirely. We are no longer asking why the working class disappeared. We are asking why organisations created in its name proved incapable of responding progressively to this transformation.

The exhaustion of national reformism

The postwar settlement in Britain emerged from definite international historical conditions. The Depression, fascism, and the Second World War had radicalised workers’ masses internationally. Britain emerged from the war economically weakened and increasingly subordinate to the United States. At the same time, the long postwar economic expansion provided the resources to make significant social concessions while preserving capitalist property relations.

Nationalisation, the National Health Service, expanded welfare provision, council housing, and collective bargaining did not abolish capitalism. They represented concessions made within it under the immense pressure of the working class. This was the environment within which Labourism acquired its postwar authority. The Labour Party claimed that Parliament could gradually transform capitalism while trade unions negotiated improvements within the existing economic order. The bureaucracy’s privileged position depended on its ability to mediate between workers and employers.

The breakdown of the postwar economic order increasingly undermined this arrangement’s foundations. The growing internationalisation of production brought national industries directly into competition within a globally organised system of production and finance. British capitalism responded by demanding wage restraint, rationalisation, closures, deregulation and attacks upon social spending. The Labour and trade-union bureaucracy confronted a historical choice. Either the working class had to challenge capitalist property relations, or its organisations had to accept British capitalism’s demands. They chose the second course.

This is the history that the language of “unmaking” threatens to obscure. Workers did not wake up one morning and decide that solidarity had become unfashionable. Collective institutions did not simply evaporate under the influence of individualism or suburbanisation. Nor was Thatcherism merely the ideological expression of an inexplicable change in national “structures of feeling”. A sustained political offensive targeted the working class, and the organisations through which workers traditionally fought increasingly became mechanisms for suppressing resistance. From the standpoint of Marxism, therefore, Thatcherism cannot be understood independently of the crisis of Labourism. The strength of the Conservative offensive ultimately depended on the political paralysis its existing leadership imposed on the working class.

The miners’ strike and the decisive historical defeat

The 1984-85 miners’ strike occupies an unavoidable position in any account of this transformation. Verso foregrounds the miners’ struggle in An Injury to All, describing its narrative as extending from the miners’ picket lines to contemporary Amazon warehouses. The strike represented a historic confrontation between the working class and the Thatcher government. The government understood that the miners represented far more than one occupational group. Their defeat would alter class relations throughout Britain.

But the decisive question is therefore not simply why the mines subsequently closed. It is why the miners were defeated. An explanation centred upon geographical restructuring or the weakening of industrial solidarities reverses cause and effect. The demoralisation that followed the destruction of the coalfields cannot adequately explain a defeat that helped produce that demoralisation.

Consequently, labour movement leadership becomes indispensable. The miners needed to mobilise the working class as a whole. Instead, their struggle remained confined to an industrial dispute, while the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy opposed any political mobilisation that could threaten the Thatcher government. The subsequent devastation of the coalfields was enormous. Jobs disappeared, communities lost their economic foundations, and decades of accumulated collective experience came under sustained pressure. But these consequences must be understood historically as the aftermath of a major political defeat.

Gibbs’s 2019 essay provides valuable evidence of the bitterness that survived in former coalfield constituencies. Discussing Bolsover, he noted hostile memories of the miners’ strike and how electoral allegiances subsequently fractured. He placed this within a broader trajectory of deindustrialisation, demobilisation, and declining attachment to the labour movement.  But hostility towards the former institutions of the labour movement cannot be treated merely as evidence of weakening working-class identity. It must also be understood as the distorted product of decades of bitter political experience.

Workers repeatedly mobilised through organisations that claimed to represent them, only to discover that those organisations refused to wage a struggle against the social order responsible for declining living standards and industrial destruction. The resulting alienation did not mean class antagonism had disappeared. It showed Labourism’s growing inability to contain that antagonism within its traditional political forms.

Hobsbawm, Marxism Today and the retreat from the working class

The theoretical lineage behind the concept of “unmaking” therefore deserves closer examination. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous intervention, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?”, offered an influential formulation of the claim that the traditional working class was losing the social weight socialist politics had supposedly depended on. Such arguments subsequently became central to the Eurocommunist current associated with Marxism Today.

The consequences were far-reaching. Rather than examining the betrayals the working class suffered and the need to build an alternative revolutionary leadership, this tendency increasingly treated changes in capitalism’s occupational composition as evidence that class politics itself had to be supplemented or replaced by broader democratic politics organised around diverse social constituencies.

The political development eventually contributed to an intellectual climate in which accommodation to the market could be presented as realism. What had begun as an argument about changes within the working class became an argument for abandoning the working class as the central revolutionary agency of socialist politics.

It is significant in this respect that Gibbs opened his 2019 essay with Hall’s formulation from “Gramsci and Us”: “You lose because you lose because you lose.” The phrase encapsulates the danger of converting political defeats into sociological inevitabilities. Workers lose. Industrial communities decline. Labour loyalties disintegrate. Nationalism or right-wing populism fills the vacuum. History becomes an accumulation of defeats whose explanation resides increasingly in transformed identities, cultures and geographies. But Marxism must ask a different question: why did they lose?

Who led these struggles? What political programme did that leadership defend? What alternatives were suppressed? Why did enormous demonstrations of working-class militancy repeatedly terminate in retreats brokered by organisations that claimed to represent the workers? Once those questions are posed, the history of postwar Britain assumes a profoundly different shape.

The working class was transformed, not abolished.

The central empirical fact confronting the “unmaking” thesis is that capitalism has not transcended wage labour. It has enormously extended it. The old industrial landscape has certainly disappeared in many areas. The pit head, shipyard and steelworks that once dominated entire towns have closed. Millions no longer work in enterprises around which dense occupational cultures developed over generations. But capitalism replaced them with other forms of proletarian labour.

Hospitals, schools, logistics depots, supermarkets, telecommunications networks, warehouses, call centres and digital platforms depend upon vast numbers of wage workers. Privatisation has transferred former public services into corporate hands while retaining workers whose labour remains socially indispensable. The important historical transition, therefore, is not from a working-class society to a post-working-class society. It is from one configuration of the working class to another.

The social character of production has meanwhile become vastly more international. A worker employed in a warehouse or logistics depot in Britain participates in production and distribution systems that extend across continents. Components, data, finance and commodities cross national borders continuously. Capital already organises production internationally. Labour remains politically divided by national institutions. This contradiction is crucial because it suggests that nationally based Labourism cannot accommodate it. The development of globalised production did not destroy the material basis for international working-class solidarity. It strengthened it.

The turn towards nationalism

Here the Scottish dimension of Gibbs’s political outlook becomes especially revealing. In his 2019 New Socialist essay, he argued that Labour’s future in Scotland required breaking with its commitment to the unitary British state. He described nationalism as having “displaced Labourism” in Scotland, supported recognition of the right to another independence referendum and advocated pressure upon the Scottish government to defy Westminster. He suggested that such confrontation could be accompanied by civil disobedience. An important democratic question concerns opposition to coercive attempts to suppress national aspirations. But that does not settle nationalism’s class character or establish it as a progressive alternative to Labourism. The Marxist starting point must be the independent interests of the working class.

A worker in Glasgow does not have fundamentally antagonistic social interests to a worker in Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff or London. They confront the same capitalist ownership structures, financial institutions, and, increasingly, the same multinational corporations. Nationalism translates capitalism-generated social grievances into political demands organised around national territory. It thereby offers another national programme precisely when capitalist development has made economic life more internationally integrated than ever before. The answer to the exhaustion of British national reformism therefore cannot be Scottish national reformism.

Changing the constitutional boundaries within which capitalist property relations operate does not abolish those relations. Neither does exchanging administration from Westminster for administration from Edinburgh resolve the contradictions between wage labour and capital. If the decisive historical development since the 1970s has been the internationalisation of capitalist production, the socialist response cannot consist of creating smaller national frameworks within which workers continue competing for investment. It must politically unify workers across national boundaries against globally organised capital.

Grangemouth and the limits of “just transition”

Gibbs’s recent work on Grangemouth provides a contemporary expression of these issues. His University of Glasgow profile describes his research into energy and industrial transition and records his involvement in work on the Grangemouth refinery closure. His publications include “Workers’ perspectives on an unjust transition: place, history, and workplace closure at Grangemouth oil refinery, Scotland”, “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance” and, in 2026, “Scotland’s unjust transition: the view from Grangemouth”. Grangemouth sharply frames the conflict between social need and private ownership.

The fundamental question is not whether workers should be consulted more effectively about industrial transition. It is who controls the productive resources upon which entire communities depend. Workers possess enormous accumulated technical knowledge. Yet under capitalist ownership, the continued operation or closure of productive facilities ultimately depends on profitability. Decisions affecting thousands of lives appear as the private prerogative of corporations and investors. A genuinely rational transition to sustainable energy production would begin from entirely different premises. Society would determine energy investment according to environmental need and human welfare rather than private profit. Workers displaced from environmentally damaging production would be guaranteed decent employment, training and living standards as productive resources were redirected. But such planning immediately raises the property question. Who owns the energy industry? Who controls investment? Who determines whether a refinery, power station or industrial plant operates? Who decides what replaces it?

These are class questions rather than merely problems of governance. A socialist programme would therefore fight to place major energy corporations and strategic industries under public ownership and democratic workers’ control as part of an internationally coordinated transformation of production.

“Who speaks for labour?”

We can now return to the question Verso asks in An Injury to All: “who now speaks for labour?” The wording itself can mislead. The fundamental problem confronting workers is not discovering somebody willing to “speak for” them. Labour politicians have spoken in workers’ names for generations. Trade-union officials do so every day. The real issue is political leadership. A class becomes an independent political force only when it understands its historical interests and develops organisations capable of fighting for them. No amount of sociological reconstruction can substitute for this task.

The old labour organisations developed within the nation-state framework. Their bureaucracy mediated between working people and national capital. When capitalist production became globally integrated, these organisations did not become internationalist. Instead, they defended the national economy more explicitly. The consequences followed inexorably. If British companies had to become “competitive”, wages and conditions had to be restrained. If investment might move elsewhere, workers had to accept concessions. When factories faced closure, union leaders sought agreements to persuade corporations that production would remain profitable.

The worker thereby ceased to be represented as a member of an international class and instead became a cost on the balance sheet of “our” national economy. This transformation cannot be understood merely as weakened solidarity. It was the political bankruptcy of nationalism and reformism under conditions of globally organised capitalism.

Not the unmaking of the working class, but the collapse of Labourism

This is ultimately the conceptual problem contained in the title An Injury to All. What disappeared was real and historically significant. Mining communities were devastated. Manufacturing towns were hollowed out. Trade-union membership declined. Labour loyalties weakened. Institutions through which generations of workers had expressed a collective identity deteriorated.

But none of this established that the working class ceased to exist. What collapsed was the identification of working-class politics with a particular set of national institutions. This distinction completely changes the historical perspective. If the working class has been “unmade”, socialist politics becomes an exercise in assembling coalitions among fragmented identities, regions and social movements. Politics moves from class towards culture, nationality and electoral sociology.

If Labourism has been exhausted while the working class itself has been objectively enlarged and internationally integrated, an entirely different conclusion follows. The problem becomes one of revolutionary leadership. The central lesson of the last half century is not that workers possessed too much belief in class struggle. Rather, enormous manifestations of class struggle remained politically subordinated to organisations committed to defending capitalism. The task therefore cannot be to recreate the labour movement of the 1950s.

Nor should socialists romanticise the industrial communities that have disappeared. Their solidarity and collective traditions represented tremendous achievements, but national reformism, trade-union bureaucracy, and, in important areas, Stalinism also dominated their political life. The future cannot be built by reconstructing the past’s institutional arrangements.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Gibbs’s title is therefore ironic. “An injury to one is an injury to all” contains a conception far more radical than nostalgia for industrial Britain’s vanished institutions. It expresses the elementary internationalist truth that workers share fundamental interests arising from their common relationship to capital. Today that proposition possesses an objective material foundation on an unprecedented scale.

The worker in a British warehouse is integrated into the same international production and distribution processes as workers throughout Europe, Asia and North America. The nurse confronting deteriorating public services, the teacher facing declining real incomes, the delivery worker controlled through an application and the engineer employed by a multinational corporation occupy different workplaces but confront the same fundamental relationship between labour and capital.

Capitalism has globalised production while preserving private ownership and the nation-state system. It has created the material foundations for international working-class unity while continuously mobilising nationalism to prevent that unity from assuming conscious political form. That contradiction, rather than the disappearance of the proletariat, defines the present historical period. Gibbs has accumulated valuable material concerning the experience and memory of deindustrialisation. His previous work demonstrates sustained engagement with the workers and communities most immediately affected by industrial restructuring. His research encompasses precisely the terrain upon which some of the central class conflicts of modern Britain have unfolded. But An Injury to All cannot ultimately be resolved through oral history, electoral sociology, or the politics of national reconstruction. “Who speaks for labour?” is the wrong question if it means searching among the remains of Labourism for another institutional representative. The working class must speak for itself.

Doing so requires a political movement independent of the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy, hostile to every attempt to divide workers by nationality, and consciously based on the international character of modern capitalist production. The British working class was not “unmade”. A historically specific labour movement based upon national reformism has undergone a profound degeneration and collapse. The distinction is not semantic. It determines whether the defeats of the past half century are seen as evidence of the disappearance of working-class politics or as historical experiences from which a new socialist movement must draw lessons.

The mines closed. Shipyards disappeared. Council estates were sold. The institutions associated with Labourism decayed. But labour did not disappear. Capital could not survive for a single day without it. The historical question is therefore not how to reconstruct the Britain of the postwar settlement. It is how the enormously expanded and internationally interconnected working class can transform itself from an objective social force into a conscious political force. In that sense the old slogan remains entirely contemporary: an injury to one is an injury to all. But taking those words seriously means following them beyond Labourism and nationalism to their necessary political conclusion: the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism.

Bibliography

Gibbs, Ewan. An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. London: Verso, 2026. [versobooks.com]

Gibbs, Ewan. Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland. London: University of London Press, 2021. [gla.ac.uk]

Gibbs, Ewan. “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis.” New Socialist, 19 December 2019. [newsocialist.org.uk]

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today, June 1987. Gibbs uses Hall’s “You lose because you lose because you lose” as the epigraph to his 2019 essay. [newsocialist.org.uk]

Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: New Left Books, 1977.

Shibe, Riyoko and Ewan Gibbs. “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance.” Journal of the British Academy, 13 (1), 2025. [gla.ac.uk]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Britain: 20 years since the year-long miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2004. This is particularly relevant to your argument because it links the miners’ defeat to the roles of Labour and the TUC and connects the exhaustion of national reformism to the globalisation of production. [wsws.org], [wsws.org]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Forty years since the British miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2024. The article places the 1984-85 struggle within the international shift toward deregulation, global investment, and internationalised production, and argues that the reformist and Stalinist organisations’ betrayals were decisive in this period’s defeats. [wsws.org]

Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism, claims to equip a new generation to understand communism’s origins, its appeal to millions, and its descent into disastrous bureaucratic regimes. This is no antiquarian exercise: Mason presents the book as a political intervention for a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced by something better. His answer is unequivocal: “not like this”.

That declared purpose makes one aspect of Reds: A Global History of Communism especially revealing: Leon Trotsky’s absence from its public-facing genealogy of communism. This point must be made carefully. No evidence currently available shows who chose the figures on the book’s cover or in its promotional material, let alone that Paul Mason personally instructed his publisher to exclude Trotsky. Any such claim would go beyond the evidence. However, the omission still has political significance worth examining. The question is not what a designer or marketing department had in mind, but why Leon Trotsky—and, above all, the historical movement associated with his name—poses such profound difficulties for any narrative that presents twentieth-century communism as a broadly continuous movement from revolutionary aspirations to totalitarian dictatorship.

What happens when we restore Leon Trotsky to his proper place in this history? The supposedly self-evident progression from the Russian Revolution to Stalinism immediately becomes a matter of political dispute. We must reckon with the Left Opposition and the struggle over the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. We must also explain the political extermination of the generation associated with the October Revolution, the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, the formation of the Fourth International, and, ultimately, Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Above all, we must address the historical claim made by Leon Trotsky and the movement he founded: Stalinism was not the inevitable fulfilment of Marxism and Bolshevism, but a bureaucratic reaction against the international socialist programme on which the October Revolution was based. That is no minor historiographical disagreement. It goes to the heart of Reds: A Global History of Communism.

From revolution to “totalitarian nightmare”

The book’s declared scope could scarcely be broader. Paul Mason deliberately begins in antiquity rather than in 1917, tracing communal and egalitarian movements through ancient and medieval society, the French Revolution, nineteenth-century anti-capitalist movements, and twentieth-century revolutionary upheavals. He says the book examines how Vladimir Lenin’s movement defeated its ideological rivals because, “for a time”, it seemed to work, before turning to what Paul Mason describes as the transformation of the twentieth-century communist experiment into a “totalitarian nightmare”.

The American promotional description is scarcely less explicit. It promises to trace communism’s development from a political idea to a mass movement and, ultimately, to totalitarian regimes. The story acknowledges the genuine heroism of workers and peasants resisting exploitation, but ultimately foregrounds repression, famine, and authoritarian rule. At a time when capitalism appears increasingly unstable and communist ideas may therefore attract renewed interest, the book is marketed as a warning against the resurgence of an “authoritarian left” and as an appeal for an anti-capitalism grounded in “universal human values”.

There is nothing objectionable in documenting the immense crimes committed by Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Marxists have no political interest in concealing them. Indeed, the strongest Marxist indictment of Stalinism was written while the liberal intelligentsia and substantial sections of the bourgeois political establishment were accommodating themselves to the Soviet bureaucracy. The issue is therefore not whether Stalinist repression should be exposed. It is how Stalinism itself is explained.

Did the bureaucratic dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin arise organically from Marxism and the October Revolution? Was Stalinism essentially Leninism carried through to its logical conclusion? Or did a bureaucratic caste emerge under historically specific conditions of economic backwardness, revolutionary isolation, exhaustion and international defeat, eventually destroying the Marxist leadership through which the working class had taken power? Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition make it impossible to evade this question.

The historical problem of Trotsky

Leon Trotsky matters not because socialists require an alternative personality cult with which to counter that surrounding Joseph Stalin. Nor can the historical argument be reduced to the claim that everything done under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was democratic and everything done afterwards was bureaucratic. Such an account would collapse under serious historical examination. The Bolsheviks confronted civil war, foreign military intervention, famine and the economic disintegration of an already backward society. During that struggle, their government employed coercive measures that remain the subject of legitimate historical and political controversy.

But this makes the subsequent conflict within the Soviet state even more important. For whatever judgement one reaches concerning Bolshevik policies during the Civil War, the Soviet Union of the late 1930s was not simply the political regime of 1917 grown older. An immense transformation had taken place. Bureaucracy had gutted the revolutionary party. Oppositionists had been expelled, imprisoned and killed. Many of the best-known figures associated with the October insurrection were accused of fantastic conspiracies, subjected to show trials and executed. The revolutionary history of the Soviet Union itself was systematically rewritten. The fundamental question therefore becomes: what social and political processes produced this transformation?

Leon Trotsky’s answer was developed over years of political struggle and reached its most systematic expression in The Revolution Betrayed. Russia’s backwardness, compounded by economic devastation and, above all, the Soviet state’s isolation after revolutions failed elsewhere, created conditions in which an administrative bureaucracy gained an increasingly privileged social position. That bureaucracy did not openly abandon the property relations established by October. Instead, it progressively monopolised political power while transforming Marxism into an ideological justification for its own interests.

The “socialism in one country” programme gave this bureaucracy its nationalist outlook. Against it, Leon Trotsky defended the conception that animated the October Revolution itself: that victory in Russia could not be seen as a nationally self-sufficient socialist development, but as the opening stage of the international socialist revolution. This political conflict cannot be removed from the history of communism without fundamentally changing that history’s meaning.

Why the omission matters

That brings us back to the cover and promotional presentation surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. The argument should not be reduced to alleging an editorial conspiracy for which there is no evidence. Covers are marketing objects, and the personalities selected for them may reflect numerous editorial, aesthetic and commercial considerations. But historical representation is never entirely innocent, especially when the book is presented not merely as a history of communism but as an intervention in contemporary arguments over whether capitalism can and should be transcended.

Trotsky’s absence therefore matters less for explaining why someone left him off the cover than for asking what happens to history once he disappears. Trotsky does not fit easily into a straightforward genealogy in which revolutionary communism develops progressively into Stalinist dictatorship. His presence immediately introduces another history: the Left Opposition’s struggle against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy, the conflict between permanent revolution and “socialism in one country”, the expulsion and persecution of oppositionists, the Moscow Trials, the founding of the Fourth International, and Trotsky’s eventual assassination in 1940. The road from October to Stalin suddenly ceases to appear inevitable.

Put Trotsky back into the picture and Stalinism itself becomes a historical problem requiring explanation. If Stalin merely completed what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had begun, why was it necessary to politically suppress the Left Opposition and eventually destroy so much of the generation associated with the October Revolution? Why did Stalinism have to rewrite the history of 1917, erase political opponents from the revolutionary record and transform “socialism in one country” into communist orthodoxy? Whatever conclusions one reaches about these questions, their existence disrupts any seamless identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism.

This is precisely why the representation matters. Trotsky’s significance does not lie in portraying him as an infallible democratic alternative to Stalin. Rather, it lies in the historical fact that Stalinism faced an organised opposition that claimed the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and socialist internationalism. The dispute, then, was not between communism and its liberal critics, but within the revolutionary movement itself, over the meaning and future of October.

The missing face consequently represents something much larger than a publishing decision. It symbolises a missing historical possibility. Restore Trotsky and the Left Opposition to the picture, and twentieth-century communism no longer appears as a single road running inexorably from revolution to dictatorship. It becomes a history of competing programmes, social forces and political struggles whose outcome was fought over, not predetermined. That is the history a new generation contemplating alternatives to capitalism.

Trotsky complicates the picture.

Return Leon Trotsky to the centre of twentieth-century communist history, and the reader encounters not one communist tradition marching inexorably towards dictatorship, but an enormous, ferocious struggle over what communism was to become. Instead of a simple chronological sequence ending in the gulag, one encounters competing programmes, different social interests and irreconcilable international strategies.

Joseph Stalin then ceases to appear merely as the next name in a succession beginning with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s decision to destroy the political tendency represented by Leon Trotsky requires explanation. Why was the Left Opposition suppressed? Why did “socialism in one country” have to defeat the internationalist perspective of permanent revolution? Why did so many leaders associated with October disappear into prisons, executions and exile? Why was the historical record of 1917 itself repeatedly falsified?

Whatever one’s ultimate judgement of Leon Trotsky’s answers, these questions cannot be dismissed without impoverishing history. This is especially true because Paul Mason presents Reds: A Global History of Communism as having an explicitly contemporary purpose. His own description links the history of the twentieth-century communist experience with present political questions surrounding China, Russia, the crisis of Western democracy, climate change and what he calls new forms of “techno-egalitarianism”. Paul Mason says that, as China and Russia challenge the democracies and a new “authoritarian left” attempts to displace social democracy, liberalism and anarchism, his book should be understood not only as history but as “a political intervention”. The history is therefore inseparable from the politics.

From revolutionary politics to radical social democracy

This gives Paul Mason’s own political evolution particular significance. He approaches Marxism neither as a conventional Cold War liberal nor as a conservative historian who has always regarded socialism with hostility. He travelled politically from the revolutionary left towards what he has described as radical social democracy. He now frames the central contemporary political division increasingly as democracy versus authoritarianism, while supporting the defence of the Western democratic order against Russia and China.

The institutional evolution accompanying this change is noteworthy. The promotional material for an October 2026 appearance identifies Paul Mason as a writer, broadcaster and “political strategist”, and as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. This does not prove anyone dictated the contents of Reds: A Global History of Communism, nor is such an argument necessary. The point is political rather than conspiratorial. The framework through which Paul Mason now examines the twentieth century has shifted profoundly from that of revolutionary Marxism.

That helps explain the extraordinary contemporary burden this history bears. The book is concerned not simply with why communist regimes emerged, developed bureaucratic dictatorships and ultimately collapsed or transformed themselves. Its lessons directly address the political choices people face today. Paul Mason acknowledges that Western democracies are stagnating, that an impending climate disaster requires radical economic solutions, and that millions elsewhere may see China’s authoritarian, state-led model as a viable alternative. Under these conditions, he says the history of communism must warn a new generation against repeating the twentieth century.

But this formulation itself raises the decisive question: What exactly would count as repeating the twentieth century? Would it mean overthrowing capitalism, building a revolutionary workers’ party, or establishing working-class political power? Or would it mean repeating Stalinism’s nationalist and bureaucratic repudiation of socialist internationalism? These are not remotely the same propositions.

Ethics against historical materialism

Paul Mason’s answer increasingly rests upon an ethical conception of socialism. The alternative to authoritarianism must be grounded in democracy and universal human values. The attraction is obvious. Against dictatorship, democracy; against brutality, humanity; against lies, truth. But moral categories cannot substitute for an analysis of the social forces that created the historical phenomena under discussion.

Marxism does not oppose democracy or human emancipation. Its distinctive contribution is to ask under what material conditions democracy exists, what classes exercise power, what social relationships sustain political institutions, and why political forms change. Without that approach, Stalin becomes primarily the representative of a disastrous political idea rather than the head of a definite bureaucratic social formation emerging under historically identifiable circumstances.

There is a further difficulty. If communism can be traced backwards through millennia as an essentially timeless desire for equality and communal existence, it becomes possible to detach it from the specific contradictions of capitalist society that produced modern Marxism. Paul Mason explicitly argues that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is deeply rooted in human nature and begins his story in antiquity rather than in 1917.

At first, this sounds like an extraordinarily generous concession to communism. Instead of communist aspirations being unnatural, they become almost universal. But the price is considerable. Communism ceases to be understood primarily as the political programme associated with a historically specific class relationship generated by capitalism itself and instead becomes an ancient human aspiration that repeatedly assumes different forms.

The specificity of Marxism is thereby weakened. Marx did not derive communism from an abstract human desire for fairness. His critique began with definite material relations of production and with the contradictions of capitalist development. The modern working class occupied a unique position not because workers were morally purer than everybody else, but because capitalist production created a social class compelled to sell its labour power while simultaneously concentrating it within increasingly socialised processes of production. Once communism is removed from that material framework, its recurrent defeats can take on the appearance of an eternal human tragedy: noble aspirations repeatedly descending into coercion when someone tries to implement them.

International revolution or socialism in one country

Here the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin assumes its full significance. Its leaders did not conceive the October Revolution as the beginning of a self-contained Russian road to socialism. Russia’s enormous economic backwardness made such a conception particularly implausible. The Bolsheviks understood their seizure of power as part of an international revolutionary crisis generated by the First World War. They expected the Russian Revolution to spark revolutionary struggles abroad, especially in Europe.

The isolation of the Soviet state was therefore not a minor complication. It transformed the conditions under which the revolutionary government had to develop. Defeats in revolutionary struggles elsewhere strengthened conservative pressures within Soviet society. After years of war, famine, civil conflict, and economic collapse, the working class that had provided the revolution’s social base was exhausted. Administrative layers acquired increasing power. Political life within the revolutionary party deteriorated.

Joseph Stalin’s emergence must be placed within this process. The resulting conflict was not simply a contest between two ambitious politicians. Behind it were opposed political programmes. The theory of “socialism in one country” rationalised an increasingly nationalist orientation in which preservation of the Soviet bureaucracy’s position became paramount. Leon Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution insisted that the fate of the Soviet workers’ state remained inseparably connected to the development of world revolution.

These competing strategic perspectives had international consequences. They shaped controversies over the Chinese Revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. Anyone attempting a global history of communism must therefore confront Trotskyism not simply as another branch of the communist family tree but as an organised Marxist challenge to the political foundations of Stalinism.

The strongest objection

Paul Mason’s defenders could reasonably answer that none of this proves Leon Trotsky represented an immaculate democratic socialism. It does not. They could point to the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the Red Terror, restrictions on opposition parties, and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy during the enormously difficult Civil War period for measures involving the militarisation of labour. These questions have generated an immense historical literature, and any serious appraisal of Bolshevism must confront them.

Indeed, the argument becomes stronger for doing so. The Marxist case against Stalinism should not depend upon constructing a sanitised picture of Soviet Russia before 1924. The revolution took place under catastrophic conditions. Its government made decisions that deserve examination and criticism. The historical debate concerns whether these measures sufficiently explain everything subsequently associated with Stalinism or whether a qualitatively different bureaucratic-political reaction developed under the pressure of isolation and defeat.

The mere existence of authoritarian measures before Joseph Stalin proves neither historical continuity nor historical inevitability. To establish that Stalinism was the necessary product of Bolshevism, one must explain why an organised opposition emerged against the bureaucracy, why the bureaucracy politically suppressed that opposition, why it had to outlaw its programme, and why so much of the revolutionary generation had eventually to be physically destroyed. Those events cannot simultaneously be treated as irrelevant and held up as evidence of an inevitable straight line from October to Stalin.

Stalin did not simply “continue” October.

This is where much conventional anti-communist historiography runs into a contradiction. If Joseph Stalin was carrying Vladimir Lenin’s project to its logical conclusion, why did his regime’s consolidation involve such extraordinary destruction of the personnel and traditions associated with the revolution? The answer cannot be that every victim was a principled socialist opponent of Stalinism. They plainly were not. Nor should we romanticise the period’s factions and political manoeuvres. But the scale of the attack upon the old Bolshevik generation remains historically significant. A regime confident that it represented a seamless continuation of October would scarcely have needed continually to rewrite October’s history.

Leon Trotsky was particularly intolerable because his political and literary activity preserved another record of the revolution and another conception of its historical significance. He participated directly in the events of 1905 and 1917, headed the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, and later became the Stalinist regime’s most prominent international opponent. The fight over historical memory was consequently inseparable from the political struggle over the future.

The Fourth International and the continuity question

This issue becomes still more acute with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. For Leon Trotsky, Hitler’s rise, without effective resistance from the enormously powerful German workers’ movement, was decisive evidence of the Stalinised Communist International’s bankruptcy. He concluded that the Third International could no longer be politically regenerated and that a new revolutionary international had to be constructed.

One can agree or disagree with that conclusion. What cannot reasonably be done is to write the political history of communism as though it does not fundamentally complicate the identification of Stalinism with Marxism. The Fourth International asserted the opposite precisely: that defending Marxism now required an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism. This is why the question of historical continuity matters. If Stalinism was communism, then organisations fighting Stalinism from the standpoint of international socialist revolution become anomalous or inconvenient footnotes. If Stalinism represented a bureaucratic degeneration of a workers’ state and a political betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, those same movements acquire central historical importance. A global history of communism must take a position on that question, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Why Trotsky breaks the picture

We can therefore return one final time to the question raised at the beginning: why does Leon Trotsky’s absence from the cover and promotional genealogy matter? Not because book-cover design constitutes historiography. It does not.

Not because we have evidence of Paul Mason sitting with his publisher and demanding, “Leave Trotsky out.” We do not. It matters because Trotsky disrupts the picture being presented. Put him back at the centre of the twentieth-century story, and “communism” no longer appears to move inexorably towards totalitarianism. Instead, there is revolutionary communism and Stalinism; internationalism and “socialism in one country”; the October Revolution and a bureaucracy that ultimately exterminated much of the generation that led it.

The Communist International emerged in the early revolutionary years, later becoming the Stalinised Comintern, with the bureaucracy and the Left Opposition fighting it. Suddenly, there was no single road. There was a crossroads. And if there was a crossroads, Stalinism cannot simply be declared the inevitable destination without reconstructing the struggle over which road to take. That is ultimately what makes Leon Trotsky so inconvenient to histories that seek to present Stalinism as the definitive historical judgement on revolutionary Marxism.

What is at stake

Paul Mason is certainly right about one thing: this history matters profoundly today. Capitalism confronts younger generations with widening social inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental crisis, deteriorating public services and widespread insecurity. In describing Reds: A Global History of Communism, Paul Mason points to stagnant Western democracies, the climate crisis, and renewed arguments over alternatives to the existing social order. He explicitly says that his political purpose is to answer a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced: “not like this”.

But the historical question remains: what did “this” mean? Did it mean the working class’s conquest of political power, revolutionary internationalism, or Marxism? Or did it mean the bureaucratic suppression of workers’ democracy, the nationalist rejection of international socialist revolution, and the destruction of the revolutionary movement that opposed those policies? These alternatives cannot be conflated without predetermining the conclusion.

The answer to the crimes of Stalinism is not to minimise them, still less to apologise for them. It is to understand their origins. And doing so requires recovering the history of those Marxists who fought the Soviet bureaucracy when doing so meant expulsion, persecution, imprisonment and ultimately death.

Leon Trotsky’s historical significance does not depend on portraying him as an infallible leader or an alternative secular saint. It rests on something far more important: Stalinism faced a Marxist opposition that challenged it in the name of international socialist revolution and sought to explain its emergence materially. This changes the historical equation. If Stalinism was already inevitably contained within Marxism and October, Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition become difficult facts to accommodate. Their struggle must either be marginalised or reduced to an unsuccessful contest for power within an essentially authoritarian movement.

But if Stalinism arose from the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the defeats of the international working class, and the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste, then Leon Trotsky belongs not at the margins of twentieth-century communist history but at its very centre. That is why his absence from the public image surrounding *Reds: A Global History of Communism* is so striking. The issue is not simply a missing face on a jacket; it is the missing historical alternative that face represents.

Mason wants to tell a new generation weighing whether capitalism can be replaced: not like this. But before that generation accepts his warning, it deserves to know that history offers another warning—one made not in retrospect by converts to liberalism or defenders of the existing order, but from within the revolutionary Marxist movement itself.

It warned that nationalism would destroy socialist internationalism; bureaucratic privilege would suffocate workers’ democracy; subordinating the international working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces would bring catastrophic defeats; and Stalinism threatened not to fulfil the programme of October, but to destroy it. The bureaucracy tried to settle that political argument through repression. It murdered revolutionaries, erased people from photographs, rewrote the history of 1917, and ultimately sent an assassin after Leon Trotsky himself. But it could not erase the historical question he represented.

The history that cannot be erased

For a new generation once again questioning whether capitalism represents the final form of human society, the conflict between Trotsky and Stalinism is anything but an academic dispute. It concerns whether the catastrophe that overwhelmed the twentieth-century communist movement was the inevitable product of socialist revolution or the outcome of its isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and the defeat of the internationalist perspective on which October was based.

This is why the answer to Stalinism cannot be a retreat into an ethically improved capitalism, supplemented by appeals to democracy and “universal human values”. The immense inequality, militarism, political reaction and social insecurity driving workers and young people towards anti-capitalist conclusions are not historical misunderstandings. They arise from capitalism itself. To invoke Stalinism as the final warning against revolutionary politics is therefore to evade the very social contradictions producing renewed interest in socialism.

Nor does answering Mason require concealing the conflicts and repressions of the early Soviet state or turning Trotsky into an infallible revolutionary saint. It requires something more serious: restoring the political alternatives that were actually fought over. The Left Opposition showed that Stalinism faced opposition from within the Marxist movement, in the name of workers’ democracy, socialist internationalism, and world revolution.

That is precisely what breaks the comforting historical equation in which Marx leads inevitably to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin and Stalin ultimately to the gulag. History offered alternatives, and political struggle defeated them rather than historical inevitability disproving them. Any genuinely global history of communism must confront that struggle. Trotsky may be absent from the public picture surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. You cannot easily remove the historical struggle he represents. And for a generation searching once again for a way beyond capitalism, recovering that suppressed history is not merely about understanding the past. It is part of preparing for future struggles.

Selected bibliography

Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.

Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1950–53.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Lewin, Moshe. Lenin’s Last Struggle. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

Mason, Paul. Reds: A Global History of Communism. London: Apollo, 2026. The UK hardback was published on 27 August 2026. [waterstones.com], [politicos.co.uk]

Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Rogovin, Vadim Z. Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books.

Service, Robert. Trotsky: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2009.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. 1932.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Stalin School of Falsification. 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Programme. 1938.

Abstract

This article examines Janan Ganesh’s recent Financial Times column, “The Man City theory of politics,” as an ideological artefact of late‑capitalist political commentary. Ganesh’s argument that contemporary political allegiance is best understood through the lens of football fandom exemplifies a broader trend within liberal‑bourgeois discourse: the displacement of structural analysis by psychological and cultural metaphors. By situating Ganesh’s intervention within the political economy of financialised sport, the transformation of social‑democratic parties, and the long history of “tribalism” as an explanatory device, this article argues that such frameworks function to obscure the class dynamics of political disaffection. The piece concludes by situating current mass movements within a Marxist theory of consciousness and crisis.

The ideological function of sporting metaphors

Sporting metaphors in political commentary are not new. Ganesh’s column distinguishes itself by claiming that football fandom provides the primary model for understanding political behaviour in the early twenty‑first century. He suggests voters behave like supporters: motivated by identity rather than argument, impervious to evidence, and loyal to their “side” regardless of its conduct. The argument is presented with the stylistic fluency characteristic of Ganesh’s work, but its political function is more significant than its rhetorical polish. It exemplifies a recurring tendency within the liberal commentariat: interpreting political alienation as a failure of mass rationality rather than a product of structural crisis.

This displacement from political economy to psychology is a hallmark of bourgeois ideology in periods of systemic instability. It allows commentators to maintain the fiction of a fundamentally rational social order while pathologising those who reject it. In this respect, Ganesh’s intervention belongs to a long lineage of liberal sociological explanation, one that treats political disaffection as a cognitive or cultural deficiency rather than as a rational response to deteriorating material conditions. The football terrace metaphor is simply the latest iteration of this ideological manoeuvre.

The analytical problem with such frameworks is not merely their superficiality but their systematic exclusion of the structural determinants of political behaviour. Treating voters as football fans brackets out the economic transformations that have reshaped political consciousness over the last four decades: stagnant real wages, the erosion of social provision, the transfer of vast public resources to the financial sector, and the militarisation of state budgets. These developments are not incidental background conditions but the central forces driving political realignment. The “tribalism” thesis functions by rendering them invisible.

Moreover, the sporting metaphor obscures the class character of political institutions themselves. Football fandom is presented as spontaneous, irrational loyalty, but the modern elite game, particularly at Manchester City, is a product of financialisation, oligarchic ownership, and global capital flows. The analogy thus collapses under its own weight. If voters behave like football supporters, then the political parties they support increasingly resemble the clubs they are asked to identify with: hollowed‑out brands owned and operated by forces entirely external to the communities they claim to represent. The metaphor inadvertently reveals more than Ganesh intends.

From a Marxist perspective, the appeal to “tribalism” is best understood as an ideological response to the crisis of bourgeois hegemony. As Antonio Gramsci observed, ruling classes confronted with declining legitimacy often resort to cultural or psychological explanations for political instability. These explanations naturalise the existing order by depicting dissent as irrational, emotional, or pre‑political. They also delegitimise alternative political movements by framing them as expressions of identity rather than responses to objective conditions.

The problem with Ganesh’s argument is therefore not simply that it is empirically thin, but that it reproduces a conceptual framework designed to foreclose structural analysis. It treats political behaviour as affective attachment rather than a historically conditioned response to crisis. In doing so, it reinforces the Financial Times’ ideological position: that the political order remains fundamentally sound, and that the challenge lies in managing the electorate’s irrational impulses.

A more adequate analysis would start from the opposite premise: that material conditions shape political consciousness, and that the erosion of traditional party loyalties reflects the breakdown of the post‑Cold War political settlement. Workers are not becoming more tribal; they are confronting a political system that no longer offers them meaningful representation. We must understand the rise of new political formations, whether reactionary or progressive, in this context.

Ganesh’s column thus serves as a symptomatic text. It reveals the anxieties of a ruling class confronted with the disintegration of its ideological authority, and it deploys the familiar tools of liberal commentary to explain that disintegration away. The sporting metaphor is not an innocent flourish. It is an ideological device that substitutes psychology for political economy, sentiment for structure, and pathology for critique.

Manchester City and the political economy of elite sport

Ganesh’s choice of Manchester City is analytically revealing. Since the Abu Dhabi ruling family acquired the club in 2008, Manchester City has become a paradigmatic example of the financialisation of elite sport. It functions simultaneously as a prestige asset, a node within a global sovereign‑wealth network, and the flagship of City Football Group’s multinational portfolio. Its competitive success cannot be separated from football’s structural transformation into a globalised entertainment commodity. Several interlocking processes characterise this transformation: the inflation of transfer markets to levels unimaginable even two decades ago; the systematic pricing‑out of traditional working‑class supporters who once constituted the social base of the sport; the conversion of clubs into vehicles for oligarchic, private‑equity and state capital; and the juridification of competition through increasingly complex financial regulations, arbitration procedures and litigation. Manchester City is not merely an illustrative case but a concentrated expression of these tendencies.

This example matters not only for what it reveals about football but also for the parallel it exposes with developments in the political sphere. Over the same period, the historic parties of the capitalist class- Labour in Britain, the Democratic Party in the United States, Germany’s SPD, and France’s Socialist Party- underwent their own form of financialisation. They retained their traditional symbols, organisational shells and rhetorical markers, but abandoned the reformist programmes that once linked them to sections of the working class. Banks, the military-intelligence apparatus, and the transnational corporate elite effectively took ownership. The parties continued to present themselves as vehicles of popular representation, but their internal structures, policy agendas, and funding networks increasingly reflected capital’s interests rather than labour’s.

The parallel between football clubs and political parties is precise. Both have been hollowed out, repurposed and rebranded. Both rely on maintaining sentimental loyalties among their respective publics, supporters in one case, voters in the other, while no longer representing the material interests of those constituencies. In both domains, the outward continuity of symbols masks a profound transformation of ownership, purpose and class function. The modern football club and the modern centre‑left party are institutions whose legitimacy depends on identities rendered historically obsolete by structural change.

From an academic perspective, this parallel invites a broader reflection on the political economy of representation under late capitalism. The financialisation of football is not an isolated cultural phenomenon but part of a wider process in which previously embedded social institutions are transformed into assets within global circuits of capital. The same logic applies to political parties, which have shifted from mass organisations rooted in specific class constituencies to professionalised entities integrated into state and corporate networks. The erosion of democratic participation, declining party membership, and the rise of technocratic governance are not merely political trends but symptoms of this deeper structural reconfiguration.

Ganesh’s invocation of Manchester City thus inadvertently illuminates the very dynamics his column seeks to obscure. By framing political allegiance as irrational fandom, he shifts attention away from the structural processes that have hollowed out political institutions and generated widespread disaffection. The football metaphor, intended as a critique of voter behaviour, instead becomes a revealing analogy for the transformation of political parties themselves. The problem is not that voters behave like supporters, but that the institutions they are asked to support have been reconstructed along lines analogous to those of elite sport: commodified, financialised and detached from the communities they once served.

In this sense, the sporting metaphor is not merely inadequate but symptomatic. It reflects an ideological tendency within liberal commentary to interpret political crisis through cultural or psychological categories rather than through the material dynamics of capitalist restructuring. The hollowing out of football clubs and political parties alike is not a matter of identity or sentiment but of ownership, class power, and the global reorganisation of capital.

The “tribalism” thesis in liberal political sociology

The notion that voters behave tribally has a long pedigree in liberal political sociology. It appears in discussions of “low‑information voters,” “left‑behind communities,” and Hillary Clinton’s now‑canonical phrase “basket of deplorables.” In each case, the explanatory burden falls on the electorate’s cognitive or cultural deficiencies rather than on the structural conditions that shape political behaviour. The electorate is imagined as fragmented into affective blocs, driven by identity, resentment, or irrational loyalty, and therefore incapable of responding to political arguments rationally or deliberatively. This interpretive framework has become increasingly prominent in commentary over the last decade, serving as a convenient shorthand for explaining political volatility without confronting the deeper social transformations that underlie it.

What this framework systematically excludes is the material history of the past four decades. Since the late 1970s, the political economy of advanced capitalist societies has changed profoundly. Stagnant real wages have become a defining feature of working-class life across the OECD: productivity growth has decoupled from wage growth, while labour’s share of national income has declined. The promise of rising living standards that underpinned the post-war settlement has broken down, giving way to precarious employment, insecure housing, and declining social mobility.

At the same time, trillions have flowed to the financial oligarchy through bank bailouts, quantitative easing and other extraordinary interventions. Though justified as necessary to stabilise the financial system, these policies have inflated asset prices, enriched capital holders and widened inequality. The political consequences of this redistribution have been profound: a growing sense that the state primarily protects financial interests and that democratic institutions are structurally incapable of representing the majority.

Austerity has also shaped the period, an agenda Ganesh himself defended in his biography of George Osborne. Austerity has brought deep cuts to public services, welfare provision and local government budgets, with working-class communities bearing a disproportionate share of the impact. It has weakened social infrastructure, from libraries and youth centres to hospitals and schools. The political effects of austerity cannot be reduced to tribalism; they stem from the lived experience of social decline and institutional abandonment.

Alongside these developments, entire regions, including Manchester and its surrounding areas, have been deindustrialised. The closure of factories, mines and steelworks has not only destroyed jobs but also dismantled the social and cultural institutions that sustained working-class life. The resulting landscape of unemployment, underemployment and economic stagnation has produced political disaffection that is rational, historically grounded and structurally determined.

Finally, over the past two decades, state budgets have become increasingly militarised, with vast sums spent on war, defence procurement, and security apparatuses even as public services collapse. Prioritising military spending over social investment reflects a broader shift in state strategy: strengthening coercive capacities at the expense of welfare functions. This shift has political consequences that cannot be reduced to identity or affect; it reflects the reorientation of state power amid capitalist crisis.

To interpret political disaffection as “tribalism” is therefore to deny the rationality of working‑class responses to these conditions. It is an ideological manoeuvre that absolves the ruling class of responsibility for the crisis it has produced. By framing political behaviour as irrational, commentators can avoid confronting the structural determinants of disaffection: the erosion of living standards, the collapse of social infrastructure, the concentration of wealth, and the militarisation of state power. The tribalism thesis functions as ideological displacement, shifting attention from political economy to psychology and from class relations to cultural identity.

From a Marxist perspective, this displacement itself signals a deeper crisis of bourgeois hegemony. When the material foundations of political legitimacy erode, ruling‑class ideology increasingly relies on cultural and psychological explanations to account for political instability. The electorate is pathologised because acknowledging the rationality of its disaffection would require confronting the social order’s failures. The tribalism thesis thus naturalises the existing system by depicting dissent as irrational, emotional, or pre‑political.

In this sense, the appeal to tribalism is not merely analytically inadequate but politically functional. It reinforces the liberal commentariat’s ideological position by framing political crisis as a problem of voter psychology rather than capitalist restructuring. It protects the ruling class’s legitimacy while delegitimising the working class’s grievances.

The commentator’s vantage point: distance as ideology

Ganesh’s column adopts the stance of the detached observer, a position he has cultivated throughout his career. He describes his ideal reader as someone who watches politics from a calm distance, like a naturalist observing animal behaviour. This self‑presentation is central to his authority at the Financial Times: a cultivated impression of disinterested sophistication, a commentator who stands above the fray and surveys political conflict with anthropological curiosity. The football metaphor reinforces this posture. In Ganesh’s framing, the commentator sits in the directors’ box, insulated from the passions of the crowd below, able to interpret their behaviour precisely because he does not share it. The terrace becomes a site of irrational collective emotion, while the hospitality suite becomes a vantage point of clarity, reason and detachment.

Yet this stance is itself ideological. The claim to neutrality, distance, and dispassion describes not Ganesh’s position but a rhetorical device that conceals its political content. Ganesh is not a neutral spectator. He is a partisan of the City of London, the transatlantic financial order and the NATO‑aligned “rules‑based” international system. His columns consistently defend the institutional architecture of contemporary capitalism: fiscal orthodoxy, Atlanticist foreign policy, technocratic governance and the primacy of financial markets. His prose’s apparent detachment is therefore not a withdrawal from politics but a mode of political intervention. It lets him present the ruling class’s interests as the natural horizon of political reason.

The Financial Times itself embodies this ideological position. Its editorial line has been unwavering in its support for austerity, its defence of militarism and its hostility to strikes. It frames these positions not as expressions of partisan loyalty but as reflections of economic necessity, geopolitical realism, or institutional responsibility. The FT’s own tribalism- its alignment with the priorities of finance capital and Western strategic power- is never described as such because it is the tribalism of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology naturalises its own commitments while pathologising those of the masses.

This dynamic is central to understanding Ganesh’s use of the football metaphor. By depicting voters as supporters driven by irrational loyalty, he implicitly contrasts their behaviour with the rationality of elite institutions. The passions of the terrace are juxtaposed with the calm deliberation of the directors’ box. But this contrast is misleading. The ruling class is no less tribal than the masses; it expresses its loyalties through different institutional forms. The commitment to fiscal austerity, for example, is not the product of dispassionate analysis but of an ideological attachment to capital’s interests. Support for NATO’s strategic posture is not a neutral assessment of global security but reflects Western elites’ geopolitical commitments. The hostility to strikes is not an objective evaluation of economic efficiency but an expression of class interest.

Ganesh’s ideological function becomes clearer when situated within the broader context of liberal political commentary. The claim to neutrality is a hallmark of bourgeois journalism, which presents its own class position as universal reason. This rhetorical strategy lets commentators delegitimise alternative political perspectives by framing them as irrational, emotional, or tribal. The working class is depicted as driven by identity, resentment or affect, while the ruling class is portrayed as guided by expertise, moderation and rationality. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is a structural feature of bourgeois ideology.

From a Marxist perspective, the problem is not merely that Ganesh misrepresents voter behaviour but that he misrepresents his own. The detachment he claims is ideological camouflage. It conceals the fact that his analysis is shaped by the interests and worldview of the class fraction he represents. The directors’ box is not a neutral vantage point; it is a site of power. The calm distance he celebrates is not a methodological virtue but a political position.

In this sense, the football metaphor is doubly revealing. It exposes the contempt with which sections of the liberal commentariat view the electorate, and it inadvertently reveals the tribalism of the ruling class itself. The passions of the terrace are pathologised, while the commitments of the boardroom are naturalised. The ideological work of Ganesh’s column lies precisely in this inversion.

Consciousness, crisis and the Marxist perspective

Marxism does not deny that identity, habit and emotion shape political consciousness. These elements form part of what Marx called the “ideological superstructure,” the ensemble of cultural and psychological forms through which individuals interpret their social world. But, as Trotsky emphasised, consciousness lags behind objective conditions and is then propelled forward by them, often violently. Political loyalties that appear stable or even innate are, in fact, historically conditioned. They reflect past stages of development and can shift rapidly when the underlying material relations change. The loyalties Ganesh treats as permanent features of human nature- tribal attachments, affective identifications, irrational solidarities- are not anthropological constants. They are historically specific and subject to abrupt reconfiguration under conditions of crisis.

This dynamic is visible in the mass movements that have emerged across Britain, Europe and the United States in recent years. The wave of strikes that has swept through transport, education, health care, logistics and manufacturing is not a tribal phenomenon. It is a rational, collective response to decades of wage suppression, deteriorating working conditions, and intensifying exploitation. Workers who may differ in nationality, race, religion or cultural identity, including football allegiance, have found common cause in struggles over pay, conditions and the defence of public services. These movements cut across the divisions the ruling class works so hard to maintain. They demonstrate that class solidarity is not an abstract ideal but an objective tendency rooted in shared material interests.

The same holds for the anti‑war demonstrations that have filled city centres from London to Berlin to New York. These mobilisations are not expressions of irrational emotion or tribal identity. They are grounded in a clear understanding of militarism’s consequences: diverting resources from social needs, escalating geopolitical conflict, and the human cost borne overwhelmingly by ordinary people. The breadth of these protests, drawing participants from diverse backgrounds and political traditions, reveals an emerging collective consciousness that transcends the narrow identities commentators like Ganesh invoke.

In both cases, what is taking shape is not tribalism but the early stages of a politically coherent response to systemic breakdown. As objective conditions deteriorate, consciousness is forced to catch up. The forms of loyalty that once anchored individuals to existing institutions- political parties, national myths, cultural identities- are eroding. In their place, new solidarities are emerging, grounded not in sentiment but in the shared experience of crisis. These movements represent the working class’s rational, collective agency in confronting a social order that can no longer meet its needs.

Conclusion: Beyond the terrace metaphor

The task is not to lament voters’ irrationality, as Ganesh and the Financial Times do, but to articulate the rational content of working‑class disaffection. The political crisis confronting the advanced capitalist states is not the product of tribal psychology, nor of some sudden collapse in civic virtue. It results from a social order that offers the majority no future. When commentators reduce political volatility to identity, affect or irrational loyalty, they obscure the material foundations of discontent and transform a structurally generated crisis into a behavioural problem. This ideological manoeuvre protects the ruling class’s legitimacy by locating the source of instability in the electorate rather than in capitalism’s own contradictions.

A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise: that political consciousness, however uneven or contradictory, contains within it a rational core shaped by lived experience. Workers’ instinctive opposition to austerity, militarism, inequality and the degradation of public services is not a failure of reason but an expression of it. The challenge is not to correct an irrational electorate but to clarify and develop the rational content of its disaffection. Consciousness lags behind objective conditions, as Trotsky observed, but crisis propels it forward. The erosion of traditional party loyalties, the collapse of trust in institutions, and the search for alternatives, however inchoate, are symptoms of a deeper process in which the old ideological anchors are losing their grip.

For this reason, the central political task is not to defend the existing order against “tribalism” but to provide a coherent alternative to it. Workers’ spontaneous opposition must be given a conscious, internationalist, socialist programme that links immediate struggles to the broader transformation of society. Such a programme must reject all forms of nationalism, identity‑based fragmentation and class collaboration. It must address the structural roots of crisis: the domination of finance capital, the militarisation of state policy, and the systematic erosion of democratic and social rights.

Therefore, we need a party independent of all factions of the capitalist class, whatever shirts they wear. Only an organisation grounded in the interests of the international working class can transform disaffection into political agency. The crisis of capitalism has stripped away the illusions that once sustained the old parties. The task now is to build the leadership capable of turning opposition into a conscious movement for socialist reconstruction.

Further Reading

Marxist Theory, Political Economy, and Class Analysis

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.

Brenner, Robert. The Boom and the Bubble: The US and the World Economy. London: Verso, 2002.

Callinicos, Alex. Bonfire of Illusions: The Twin Crises of the Liberal World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

Clarke, Simon. Marx’s Theory of Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.

Harman, Chris. Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx. London: Bookmarks, 2009.

Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge, 2003 (original work published 1913).

Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1990 (original work published 1867).

Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016.

Financialisation, Neoliberalism, and State Restructuring

Crouch, Colin. The Strange Non‑Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Fine, Ben. Theories of Social Capital: Researchers Behaving Badly. London: Pluto Press, 2010.

Gamble, Andrew. The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter (eds.). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Labour, Deindustrialisation, and Working‑Class Politics

Beatty, Christina and Fothergill, Steve. The State of the Coalfields. Sheffield: CRESR, 2021.

Bluestone, Barry and Harrison, Bennett. The Deindustrialisation of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Kirk, Neville. Comrades and Cousins: Globalisation, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914. London: Merlin Press, 2003.

Moody, Kim. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.

Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalisation since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Media, Ideology, and Political Commentary

Bourdieu, Pierre. Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action. London: Verso, 2008.

Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Curran, James and Seaton, Jean. Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain. London: Routledge, 2018.

Davis, Aeron. Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Schudson, Michael. The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Imperialism, Militarism, and Geopolitics

Callinicos, Alex. Imperialism and Global Political Economy. London: Polity Press, 2009.

Foster, John Bellamy. The New Imperialism of Globalised Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021.

Kiely, Ray. The Politics of Empire: Globalisation and the Postcolonial World. London: Routledge, 2005.

Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Football, Capital, and Cultural Political Economy

Conn, David. The Fall of the House of FIFA. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2017.

Giulianotti, Richard. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

Hognestad, Hans and Tolvhed, Daniel (eds.). Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe: States, Media and Markets 1950–2010. London: Routledge, 2020.

Millward, Peter. The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Szymanski, Stefan. Money and Football: A Soccernomics Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Introduction: A revolutionary life trapped in the cul‑de‑sacs of Stalinism

Few figures on the post-war left embody both the courage of class-conscious militants and the political dead end into which they were channelled as starkly as Claudia Jones. Born in Port of Spain in 1915, raised in poverty in Harlem, and drawn into the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) by the explosive social contradictions of Depression-era America, Jones’s life traces the path of a generation of revolutionary-minded workers whose aspirations were ultimately constrained by Stalinist politics.

Her rise to national leadership in the CPUSA, imprisonment during the McCarthyite witch-hunt, and deportation in 1955 were not merely biographical episodes; they expressed the ferocity with which American capitalism sought to crush any organised challenge from the working class. Jones spent her final nine years in London and died in 1964, aged just 49. Her grave lies a few yards from Karl Marx’s, a poignant symbol of the revolutionary tradition she believed she served and of the political betrayal that shaped and limited her life’s work.

The renewed interest in Jones over the past decade in academic feminism, Black radical studies, and cultural histories of the Notting Hill Carnival reflects a broader effort to recover the suppressed or marginalised voices of twentieth-century radicalism. First published in the late 1990s and reissued in 2021 as part of Lawrence Wishart’s Radical Black Women series, Marika Sherwood’s biography is among the most substantial documentary efforts in this area. Sherwood’s archival research, oral-history interviews, and account of Jones’s London years offer material that would otherwise be inaccessible. In this sense, the book is a valuable record: a collection of fragments from a life shaped by surveillance, repression, and political isolation.

Yet framing the biography primarily through race and gender obscures the decisive political questions that shaped Jones’s trajectory. It portrays the life of a communist without seriously reckoning with the communist movement’s own politics. Jones’s commitments, theoretical contributions, and organisational work cannot be understood apart from the Communist International’s historical degeneration under Stalin, the transformation of communist parties into instruments of Soviet foreign policy, and the strategic zigzags that followed. Like much contemporary scholarship, Sherwood’s narrative treats Jones’s Marxism as historical backdrop rather than the central axis of her intellectual and political identity.

This omission matters. Jones did not simply “happen” to be a communist; the CPUSA’s political line shaped her, defended her, and exacted a price from her. Her best-known theoretical work, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949), is now celebrated as an early articulation of what later became known as intersectionality. But its central insight, that Black working women were the most exploited sector of the American proletariat, came from Marxist analysis rather than identity-based frameworks. Jones’s politics were inseparable from the CPUSA’s positions on the Popular Front, the no-strike pledge, the Black Belt thesis, and the party’s subordination to Roosevelt and, later, the Democratic Party. Her deportation was not simply the persecution of a Black woman or a feminist; it was the persecution of a communist at a time when the American state sought to destroy the organised left.

By foregrounding race and gender while downplaying the political content of Jones’s Marxism, Sherwood’s biography reflects a broader trend in contemporary historiography: sanitising communist militants into cultural icons or symbols of identity. Jones is presented as a pioneering Black woman, a proto-intersectional thinker, and a carnival founder- all true, but partial. What disappears is the central tragedy of her life: she channelled her revolutionary energy, intellect, and organisational skill into a political movement that abandoned the programme of world socialist revolution. This introduction sets the stage for a closer examination of Jones’s politics, the limitations Stalinism imposed, and contemporary misreadings that obscure her significance.

The historiography surrounding Claudia Jones has transformed profoundly in recent decades. Once relegated to the margins of Cold War studies, feminist theory, and Black radical historiography, Jones has increasingly been recognised as one of the twentieth century’s most important communist women. This shift is not simply scholarly recovery; it is a political struggle over memory, ideology, and the place of Marxist-Leninist women in the genealogy of revolutionary thought. Lydia Lindsey’s Red Monday represents the most recent and arguably most incisive intervention in this evolving field. Her work does not merely restore Jones to the historical record; it indicts the structures that silenced her, from the U.S. state to the academy itself.

The earlier historiographical silence surrounding Jones was not accidental. For much of the late twentieth century, Jones appeared only fleetingly in studies of McCarthyism or Caribbean diaspora politics. Feminist scholarship, shaped by liberal and nationalist frameworks, struggled to integrate a communist woman whose analysis foregrounded class exploitation rather than identity. The Cold War’s ideological policing scattered Jones’s writings, disrupted her networks, and fragmented her intellectual legacy. The destruction of her papers, symbolised by the dramatic scene on 14 November 1955, when New York firefighters forced their way into her apartment as she burned personal documents to protect comrades, was both literal and metaphorical. The state sought not only to repress Jones but to erase the intellectual infrastructure of Black communist women.

The historiographical shift began with works such as Dayo Gore’s Radicalism at the Crossroads and Carole Boyce Davies’s Left of Karl Marx. These studies challenged Cold War narratives that depicted communist women as passive or manipulated, instead emphasising their theoretical autonomy and internationalist commitments. Gore underscored the political consequences of Jones’s erasure: by severing her from U.S. networks and deporting her, the state not only destroyed her health but also severed the intellectual communities that might have preserved her work. Davies extended this argument by situating Jones within Caribbean political traditions and emphasising her role in shaping diasporic consciousness in Britain.

Yet even these important interventions did not fully resolve the historiographical problem. Jones remained a figure whose political commitments- Marxism, Leninism, anti-imperialism- were often treated as secondary to her cultural achievements. In Britain, she was memorialised as the founder of the West Indian Gazette and as a pioneer of Caribbean carnival culture. Still, her two decades of radical activism in the United States were largely omitted. This depoliticised framing reflected a broader tendency within British multicultural historiography to celebrate cultural expression while marginalising revolutionary politics. As Dayo Gore notes, Britain’s memory of Jones often celebrates culture rather than Marxist‑Leninist struggle.

In this context, we must understand Lydia Lindsey’s Red Monday. Lindsey’s intervention is historiographical, political, and polemical. Her central thesis is uncompromising: Claudia Jones was systematically silenced. The Cold War “muzzled” her voice, and later academic frameworks- particularly those shaped by liberal feminism and identity-based theories- struggled to accommodate a Marxist‑Leninist Black woman whose analysis prefigured what is now called intersectionality. Lindsey argues that Jones’s erasure resulted not only from state repression but also from intellectual paradigms that could not integrate a revolutionary woman whose politics were inseparable from global anti‑imperialist struggle.

Lindsey situates Jones within a longer intellectual tradition of Black communist women. Although Jones is often credited with popularising the concept of “triple oppression”, the interlocking exploitation of race, class, and genderLindsey notes that Louise Thompson Patterson used the term “triply oppressed” in the same year Jones joined the Communist Party. Patterson applied the concept to domestic workers, emphasising the structural vulnerability of Black women in the U.S. labour market. Jones, however, expanded the framework dramatically. She linked tripartite oppression to anti‑colonialism, anti‑imperialism, anti‑fascism, and the global peace movement. This internationalist orientation, Lindsey argues, makes Jones “the mother of global revolutionary thought,” because she fused the struggles of Black women with the broader Marxist‑Leninist project of world revolution.

Crucially, Lindsey insists that Jones’s concept of tripartite oppression was dynamic rather than static. It evolved across time and space, shaped by Jones’s experiences in the United States, the Caribbean diaspora, and later Britain. In the twenty‑first century, Lindsey argues, Jones’s framework is expressed through the language of intersectionality. But she is careful to distinguish Jones’s Marxist analysis from later identity‑based theories. For Jones, the oppression of Black women was not simply a matter of overlapping identities but a structural consequence of capitalist exploitation. In her view, Black women were the most exploited sector of the working class and therefore central to revolutionary transformation. Lindsey emphasises that contemporary discussions of intersectionality often lose this class-rooted analysis, foregrounding identity rather than exploitation.

This distinction has become a major theme in current historiography. Scholars such as Charisse Burden‑Stelly and Keisha Blain argue that Jones’s analysis of super‑exploitation provides a materialist foundation for intersectionality that contemporary theory often lacks. Jones’s insistence that Black women occupy a structurally decisive position within the capitalist labour process challenges both liberal feminism and depoliticised versions of intersectionality. Lindsey’s work thus intervenes in contemporary theoretical debates, insisting that any serious genealogy of intersectional analysis must recognise its Marxist origins.

A renewed interest in communist women, Black internationalism, and the global dimensions of feminist struggle characterises the present historiographical moment. Jones stands at the centre of these conversations. Her writings on peace, anti‑imperialism, and colonial liberation resonate with contemporary debates about global capitalism, racialised labour, and the gendered dimensions of exploitation. Scholars increasingly recognise Jones as belonging to the genealogies of Black radicalism, feminist theory, anti‑imperialism, and Marxist‑Leninist political practice.

Lindsey’s Red Monday marks a decisive moment in this historiographical transformation. It does not simply restore Jones’s voice; it challenges the structures that silenced her. Lindsey indicts the Cold War state for its repression, but she also critiques the academy for its inability to integrate communist women into feminist and intellectual history. Her work demands a rethinking of the very frameworks through which feminist theory and Black radicalism have been understood.

Ultimately, Red Monday presents Jones not merely as a victim of Cold War repression but as a visionary thinker whose analysis of super‑exploitation and tripartite oppression anticipated contemporary debates about intersectionality. Lindsey argues that recovering Jones’s voice is essential to reconstructing a truly internationalist, working‑class feminist tradition- one that recognises the centrality of Black women to revolutionary transformation and refuses to separate struggles against racism and sexism from the fight against capitalism itself.

For Marxists, recovering Claudia Jones’s history is not simply an academic exercise. It is part of the broader struggle to reclaim the revolutionary traditions that Cold War repression sought to destroy. Lindsey’s Red Monday powerfully contributes to that struggle, restoring Jones to her rightful place in the history of global revolutionary thought and challenging us to confront the ideological forces that still shape historical memory today.

A record worth having: Sherwood’s archival contribution

Sherwood’s strengths lie in her archival persistence. Working against the grain of Cold War erasure, she reconstructs Claudia Jones’s life from fragmentary sources, scattered documents, and the memories of those who worked alongside her. Much of Jones’s personal archive was destroyed, some by the FBI, some by Jones herself in moments of fear and necessity, leaving historians with only shards of a life lived under surveillance. Sherwood’s determination to piece together these remnants gives her biography a documentary value that few other accounts possess. For British readers in particular, the chapters on Jones’s London years are indispensable, offering one of the clearest portraits of the political and social terrain in which Jones operated after her deportation.

Jones arrived in London in December 1955, penniless, ill, and politically isolated. Her health had been broken by years of tuberculosis, heart disease, and the brutal conditions of Alderson federal prison. Yet she immediately immersed herself in civil‑rights struggles among Caribbean workers, refusing any retreat into private life or quiet exile. She founded the West Indian Gazette in 1958, Britain’s first major Black newspaper, produced on a shoestring budget above a record shop in Brixton. The paper became a crucial organising centre for campaigns against racist policing, discriminatory housing practices, and the tightening of immigration controls. It also served as a forum for anti‑colonial politics, linking Caribbean, African, and Asian struggles against British imperialism.

Sherwood’s account of these years is one of the book’s strongest contributions. She captures the atmosphere of post‑war Britain with clarity: the “Keep Britain White” graffiti scrawled across North Kensington; Oswald Mosley’s return to street agitation; the landlords’ notorious “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” signs; and the routine police harassment faced by Caribbean youth. This was not the multicultural London of later decades but a city in which the presence of Black workers was treated as a social problem to be contained. Jones fought relentlessly, organising meetings, writing editorials, and building networks of solidarity across fragmented immigrant communities.

The Notting Hill riots of August–September 1958 marked a turning point. White gangs, encouraged by fascist organisations, launched sustained attacks on Black residents over several nights. The violence exposed the depth of racial hostility in British society and the indifference of the authorities. In response, Jones organised an indoor Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959, an act of cultural self‑assertion and political defiance. Sherwood’s documentation of this initiative corrects narratives that portray migrant workers as passive victims. Jones’s carnival was not a celebration of diversity but a conscious attempt to strengthen the morale of a community under siege. It asserted that Caribbean people would not be driven out.

Sherwood is equally clear about the American state’s vindictiveness. Jones’s arrests under the Smith Act, her imprisonment at Alderson, her deteriorating health, and her eventual deportation are all recorded with appropriate indignation. The biography conveys the relentlessness of the McCarthyite campaign: the surveillance, the raids, the interrogations, the legal harassment, and the calculated cruelty of deporting a chronically ill woman who had lived in the United States since childhood. Claudia Jones’s persecution belongs in the long indictment of American “democracy,” which has always reserved its harshest measures for those who challenge the capitalist order from the left.

Yet Sherwood’s narrative, for all its documentary richness, stops short of analysing the political context that shaped Jones’s persecution. Jones was not simply a victim of anti‑communism; she was a leader of a party whose political line had been subordinated to the foreign‑policy needs of the Soviet bureaucracy. Her imprisonment was not only an attack on a Black woman or a civil‑rights activist but on a communist cadre whose work was inseparable from the strategic zigzags of Stalinism. Sherwood records the events but does not interrogate the politics that made Jones both vulnerable to repression and unable to develop an independent revolutionary perspective.

This limitation becomes clear in Sherwood’s treatment of Jones’s theoretical contributions. Jones’s analysis of the super‑exploitation of Black women, her insistence on the centrality of race and gender within the working class, and her critique of American capitalism are all presented as early expressions of what is now called intersectionality. But Sherwood does not explore how these insights emerged from Jones’s Marxist commitments, nor how they were shaped and constrained by the CPUSA’s Stalinist framework. The biography documents Jones’s work but does not situate it within the broader crisis of the communist movement.

In this sense, Sherwood’s book reflects a wider trend in contemporary historiography: recovering communist figures as cultural icons or identity‑based pioneers while leaving their political context unexamined. Jones becomes a symbol of Black resilience, a proto‑intersectional thinker, and a carnival founder, all true but insufficient. What disappears is the central contradiction of her life: that her revolutionary energy was channelled into a political movement that had abandoned the programme of world socialist revolution.

The question Sherwood avoids: the politics of the Communist Party

What Sherwood fails to confront, and what any serious assessment of Claudia Jones must begin with, is the political character of the movement to which Jones devoted her life. Jones joined the Young Communist League in the mid-1930s, inspired by the CPUSA’s defence of the Scottsboro Boys and its reputation as the United States’ most militant opponent of racism. Millions of workers and young people saw the Soviet Union as the embodiment of the October Revolution, the first successful overthrow of capitalism. Yet by the time Jones entered the movement, the Communist International had already become an instrument of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Kremlin set its policies not to meet the needs of the international working class, but to serve the Soviet state’s foreign-policy requirements.

Jones’s political development tracked every turn in this line. The CPUSA repeatedly changed its strategic orientation not through democratic debate or Marxist analysis, but through abrupt shifts imposed from Moscow. Jones advanced within the party by adapting to these shifts, which shaped both her theoretical work and practical activity. The first major shift was the Popular Front, launched in 1935. Under this policy, the CPUSA subordinated the working class to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, portraying the New Deal coalition as a progressive force against fascism. The party abandoned independent working-class politics in favour of alliances with liberal politicians, trade-union bureaucrats, and sections of the middle class. As a rising cadre, Jones absorbed this orientation. Her early writings emphasised unity with “progressive forces,” reflecting the party’s move away from revolutionary struggle.

The second shift came with the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939. Overnight, the CPUSA reversed its position: Roosevelt became an imperialist warmonger, and the party denounced the war as a conflict between rival capitalist powers. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the party changed course again and became the most enthusiastic supporter of the American war effort. It backed the wartime no-strike pledge, suppressing labour militancy just as workers were fighting speed-ups, wage freezes, and racist hiring practices in war industries. The party opposed A—Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, which aimed to challenge discrimination in defence production. Any independent struggle by Black workers was treated as a threat to the wartime alliance with American imperialism.

Jones supported these positions. Her speeches and articles from this period reflected the CPUSA’s insistence that Black workers subordinate their demands to the national war effort. This was not a personal failing, but the result of a political line that placed the defence of the Soviet Union, as interpreted by the Stalinist bureaucracy, above the independent interests of the American working class. The next shift came during Browder’s leadership. In 1944, under Earl Browder, the CPUSA dissolved itself and became a “political association,” arguing that capitalism and socialism could coexist peacefully after the war. Browder’s liquidationism was not a theoretical innovation, but an extension of Popular Front logic. By then a prominent figure in the party’s women’s work, Jones also adapted to this line.

In 1945, the Kremlin signalled through French Stalinist Jacques Duclos that Browder had gone too far, and the CPUSA reconstituted itself overnight. Jones followed suit, becoming one of the party’s leading voices on the “Negro question.” Her best-known essay, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” (1949), is now celebrated as proto-intersectional. Its genuine insight that Black working women were the most exploited section of the American proletariat comes from Marxism, not later theories of overlapping oppressions. Jones understood exploitation as a class relation intensified by racism and sexism. Her analysis was grounded in the material conditions of Black women workers, not abstract identity categories.

But Jones also defended the CPUSA’s mechanical Stalinist schema of “self-determination for the Negro nation in the Black Belt.” This policy treated Black workers as a separate national question, rather than as a decisive part of the American working class. Applied mechanically from Moscow, it failed to engage seriously with the actual dynamics of class struggle in the United States. The CPUSA’s position fragmented the working class and diverted Black militancy into politically sterile nationalist channels.

Leon Trotsky’s 1939 discussions with C.L.R. James framed the issue correctly. Trotsky argued that the decisive question was the independent mobilisation of Black workers within the broader socialist struggle of the working class, against both the Democrats and the trade-union bureaucracy. He saw Black workers’ revolutionary potential as rooted in their position within the proletariat, not in a separate national identity. His analysis offered a path to genuine working-class unity and revolutionary leadership.

London and the British Road: a political dead end

When Claudia Jones arrived in Britain in December 1955, she found a political landscape already shaped, and increasingly distorted, by the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) strategic capitulation. The Party’s 1951 programme, *The British Road to Socialism*, vetted and approved by Stalin himself, had renounced revolutionary politics in favour of parliamentary gradualism, constitutional niceties, and pressure on the Labour Party. It subordinated the working class to the institutions of bourgeois democracy, treating socialism not as the product of mass struggle but as the outcome of legislative reform. A Marxist-Leninist shaped by the U.S. Communist Party’s militant anti-racist and anti-imperialist traditions, Jones joined a movement whose leadership had already abandoned the revolutionary road.

Within months of Jones’s arrival, the contradictions inherent in this orientation came to a head. Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in February 1956 exposed the crimes of Stalin’s bureaucracy, while the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian workers’ uprising later that year revealed the regime’s true nature: a counter-revolutionary force crushing workers’ councils in the name of “socialism.” Thousands left the CPGB in disgust. The Party’s membership collapsed, and its moral authority disintegrated. For Jones, who had endured imprisonment, surveillance, and deportation for her communist convictions, the crisis was not merely organisational; it was ideological. The movement to which she had devoted her life proved incapable of defending the working class’s revolutionary self-activity.

In this context, Sherwood’s account of tensions between Jones and the CPGB leadership, which he interprets as racial insensitivity, misses the deeper political point. Racism certainly existed within the Party, as it did across the broader labour movement, but the fundamental issue was not interpersonal prejudice; it was the political logic of Stalinist nationalism. A party oriented toward Labour and trade-union bureaucracies- institutions that supported immigration controls, tolerated racist practices, and defended the imperial state- could not lead an independent struggle against racism. The CPGB’s strategy required it to follow the Labour left rather than confront it, adapt to union chauvinism rather than challenge it, and treat Black workers as auxiliaries to the “British road,” not as a revolutionary force in their own right.

This was not a failure of “allyship,” but the structural result of a programme that rejected internationalism in favour of national roads to socialism. Forged in the crucible of U.S. anti-racist struggle, Jones’s politics were fundamentally incompatible with a Party that subordinated anti-imperialism to parliamentary respectability. She argued that Black workers faced super-exploitation and therefore occupied a decisive position within the working class. This clashed with a leadership that saw racism as a secondary issue to be addressed only after socialism’s parliamentary advance. Jones understood racism as a structural feature of British capitalism; the CPGB treated it as an individual moral failing. The gulf was political, not personal.

Jones’s later 1964 travels to Moscow and China, in search of revolutionary clarity amid the Sino-Soviet split, illustrate the tragedy of her generation. The split was not a debate over revolutionary strategy, but a conflict between rival bureaucracies, each claiming to represent Marxism while suppressing workers’ democracy. Like many communists of her era, Jones searched for alternatives within the very apparatus that had already betrayed the revolution. Her journey reflects the historical impasse of mid-century communism: militants committed to internationalism and anti-imperialism found themselves trapped in organisations that had abandoned both.

Yet Jones’s tragedy was also her strength. Her political clarity, grounded in the Marxist analysis of super-exploitation and tripartite oppression, enabled her to recognise what the CPGB leadership could not: racism was not an appendage of capitalism but one of its organising principles. In Britain, her work, from founding the West Indian Gazette to organising the first indoor Caribbean carnival, was not cultural activism but political intervention. She aimed to build an independent Black working-class organisation at a time when the CPGB offered only parliamentary gradualism and appeals to Labour.

The historiography has often depoliticised this period, presenting Jones as a cultural pioneer rather than a revolutionary Marxist. But her conflicts with the CPGB were not the result of personality or cultural difference. They resulted from a Party that had abandoned the revolutionary road and a militant who refused to do so. Jones’s insistence on linking anti‑racism to anti‑imperialism, and both to working‑class struggle, placed her outside the political logic of the CPGB’s British Road. She was, in effect, a revolutionary trapped within a reformist organisation.

Her 1964 travels, undertaken in search of ideological clarity, reveal the limits of the Stalinist world she inhabited. The bureaucratic regimes of Moscow and Beijing could not provide the revolutionary answers she sought. Yet her search itself testifies to her unwavering commitment to Marxism as a living, internationalist tradition. Jones’s tragedy was not that she believed in revolution; it was that the organisations claiming to represent it had long ceased to do so.

In the end, Jones’s British years illuminate the broader crisis of mid‑century communism: the contradiction between revolutionary aspirations and bureaucratic realities. Stalinist nationalism shaped her life in Britain, yet her politics transcended it. She remains a figure whose clarity, courage, and uncompromising internationalism rebuke the parliamentary gradualism that dominated the CPGB and remind us that the struggle against racism and capitalism must be fought together, not sequentially.

Identity politics and the sanitisation of history

Lola Olufemi’s preface to Radical Black Women rightly insists that Claudia Jones must be remembered as a communist and highlights her attention to race and gender. This is a welcome corrective to the depoliticised, council‑friendly version of Jones that circulates in official multiculturalism: the carnival icon, the smiling Google doodle, the harmless symbol of “community cohesion.” Such representations flatten her politics into cultural heritage and erase the revolutionary content of her life. Yet Olufemi’s injunction“remember her as a communist” risks becoming meaningless if communism is equated with the Stalinist parties that abandoned Marxism. To remember Jones as a communist requires remembering the political tradition she believed she served, not the bureaucratic apparatus that ultimately betrayed it.

The Radical Black Women series, despite its archival value, frames Jones primarily through race and sex categories central to an academic professional layer for whom representation has displaced class struggle. This is not accidental. Contemporary academic feminism, shaped by identity‑based frameworks and institutional diversity agendas, tends to treat race and gender as autonomous categories of analysis, detached from the dynamics of capitalist exploitation. Jones’s own politics sit uneasily within this framework. She did not understand herself as the representative of a racial or gendered constituency. She understood herself as a Marxist, an internationalist, and a militant of the working class.

The West Indian Gazette, founded in 1958, was not conceived as a cultural magazine for Caribbean identity. It was a political organ for Caribbean, African, and Asian workers united against imperialism. Its pages carried reports on anti‑colonial struggles, trade‑union battles, and the global peace movement. Jones’s editorial line was clear: racism could not be fought through cultural assertion alone but only through organised working‑class struggle against capitalism and empire. She did not imagine her work as the expression of a single identity group. She imagined it as part of a global revolutionary movement.

This is precisely what contemporary identity‑based readings obscure. By foregrounding race and gender as the primary interpretive lenses, the Radical Black Women series risks reproducing the very depoliticisation it seeks to challenge. Jones becomes a pioneering Black woman, a proto‑intersectional thinker, a symbol of representation rather than a communist whose analysis of super‑exploitation emerged from Marxist theory. Her insistence that Black women were the most exploited sector of the working class was not an early gesture toward intersectionality but a materialist analysis of capitalist labour relations. She understood race and gender not as identities but as structural mechanisms of exploitation.

The problem is not simply academic misinterpretation. It is the broader ideological climate in which Jones is remembered. In Britain, official multiculturalism has long preferred cultural icons to political militants. Carnival is celebrated; anti‑imperialism is forgotten. The Gazette is praised as a community newspaper; its communist politics are ignored. Jones’s grave lies next to Marx, yet her politics are often presented as a colourful footnote to post‑war Black British history rather than as part of the Marxist tradition itself.

To recover Jones as a communist requires more than acknowledging her Party membership. It requires recognising that mid-century communism’s contradictions shaped her politics: the struggle against racism and imperialism within organisations that had abandoned revolutionary strategy. Jones’s commitment to Marxism was sincere, but the Stalinist parties she served had long ceased to represent the working class’s revolutionary self-activity. Remembering her as a communist means remembering the political tragedy of her generation of militants searching for revolutionary clarity within bureaucratic structures that could no longer provide it.

Contemporary historiography should not insert Jones into identity-based frameworks but restore the political content of her life: her Marxism, her internationalism, her analysis of super‑exploitation, and her belief that Black workers were central to world revolution. Anything less reduces her to a symbol and repeats the Cold War’s silencing in a new, liberal form.

A life of courage, wasted by the politics she inherited

Sherwood’s biography of Claudia Jones remains a valuable documentary record of an extraordinary woman. It preserves fragments of a life lived under surveillance, repression, and exile; it captures Jones’s energy, her discipline, her intellectual seriousness, and her refusal to bend before the McCarthyite state. Sherwood’s archival work ensures that Jones cannot be erased from the historical record. But the political analysis needed to understand Jones’s life, commitments, and tragedy is largely absent. Readers must supply what Sherwood avoids: a reckoning with the politics of Stalinism, the degeneration of the communist movement, and the structural forces that shaped Jones’s trajectory.

The tragedy of Claudia Jones is not only that capitalism hounded her across the Atlantic, imprisoning her, destroying her health, and finally deporting her. It is that her extraordinary talents- her theoretical insight, her organisational skill, her internationalism- were channelled into the service of a bureaucratic apparatus that had long abandoned the programme of world socialist revolution. Jones devoted her life to a movement that no longer embodied the revolutionary Marxism she believed she was defending. She remained loyal to Lenin’s tradition, the 1919 Comintern, and the global struggle against imperialism. But the organisations she served no longer carried that tradition. They became nationalised bureaucracies, oriented toward parliamentary manoeuvres and diplomatic alliances, and contained working‑class self‑activity.

This contradiction shaped every stage of Jones’s political life. In the United States, she fought racism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation through a Communist Party that increasingly subordinated Black liberation to Popular Front alliances with the Democratic Party. In Britain, she joined the CPGB, committed to The British Road to Socialism, a programme that renounced revolution in favour of constitutional gradualism and pressure on Labour. The Party’s orientation toward the trade‑union and Labour bureaucracies- institutions that themselves supported immigration controls and tolerated racist practices- made it structurally incapable of leading an independent struggle against racism. Jones’s conflicts with the CPGB leadership were not simply matters of racial insensitivity, as Sherwood suggests. They were political. A party that had abandoned revolutionary strategy could not meet the needs of the most exploited and oppressed layers of the working class.

Jones’s later 1964 travels to Moscow and China, undertaken in search of revolutionary clarity amid the Sino‑Soviet split, reveal the tragedy of her generation. She sought answers within bureaucratic regimes that had already betrayed the revolution. Her search was sincere, but the terrain was barren. The split between Moscow and Beijing was not a debate over revolutionary strategy but a conflict between rival state bureaucracies. Jones’s political isolation was not personal; it was historical. She belonged to a generation of militants whose revolutionary aspirations were channelled into organisations that could no longer fulfil them.

This is why contemporary attempts to remember Jones through identity‑based frameworks- race, gender, representation- are inadequate. They obscure the political content of her life. Jones was not an icon of diversity, nor a symbol of cultural resilience. She was a Marxist, an internationalist, and a revolutionary. Her analysis of super‑exploitation and tripartite oppression emerged from Marxist theory, not from identity politics. She understood Black women as the most exploited sector of the working class, not as a demographic constituency seeking representation within existing structures.

The lessons of Jones’s life belong to the working class. They belong to those who continue to fight racism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation, not to the curators of identity politics, and not to the Stalinist parties that failed her. To honour Jones is to confront the political forces that silenced her, to reclaim the revolutionary tradition she believed she served, and to recognise that the struggle she waged remains unfinished.

Bibliography

Books and Monographs

• Boyce Davies, Carole. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
• Burden‑Stelly, Charisse. Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorising Capitalist Racism in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
• Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: NYU Press, 2011.
• Lindsey, Lydia. Red Monday: The Silencing of Claudia Jones in 20th Century Feminist Revolutionary Thought. (Publication details forthcoming / Journal of Intersectionality special issue).
• Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. London: Hajar Press, 2021.
• Olufemi, Lola (ed.). Radical Black Women: A Reader. London: Pluto Press, 2024.
• Sherwood, Marika. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999.
• Singh, Nikhil Pal. Race and America’s Long War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
• Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism. London: Verso, 1990.
• West, Michael O. and William G. Martin (eds.). From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Articles and Chapters

• Burden‑Stelly, Charisse. “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Considerations.” Monthly Review 73, no. 4 (2021): 1–14.
• Davies, Carole Boyce. “Claudia Jones: Feminist, Communist, Transnationalist.” Race & Class 49, no. 2 (2007): 69–78.
• Gore, Dayo F. “Black Women’s Radical Activism and the Long Cold War.” Souls 15, no. 3 (2013): 19–41.
• Lindsey, Lydia. “Claudia Jones and the Muzzling of Marxist Feminism.” Journal of Intersectionality 8, no. 1 (2024): 45–68.
• Makalani, Minkah. “The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Black Internationalism.” In From Toussaint to Tupac, edited by West and Martin, 67–92. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009.
• Moore, Brian. “The West Indian Gazette and the Politics of Black Britain.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–20.
• Ransby, Barbara. “Black Internationalism, Women, and the Global Left.” Meridians 15, no. 1 (2016): 1–25.
• Robinson, Cedric J. “The Black Radical Tradition.” The Black Scholar 12, no. 1 (1981): 2–11.

Primary Sources by Claudia Jones

• Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs (June 1949): 22–29.
• Jones, Claudia. “We Seek Full Equality for Women.” Daily Worker (1950).
• Jones, Claudia. The Caribbean Community in Britain. London: West Indian Gazette Pamphlet Series, 1962.
• Jones, Claudia. “The Caribbean Carnival: A People’s Art.” West Indian Gazette (1963).

Cold War, Communism, and Stalinism

• Finkel, David. “Stalinism and the Defeat of the Revolution.” Against the Current 15, no. 2 (1988): 12–20.
• Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918–1923. London: Bookmarks, 1982.
• McIlroy, John and Alan Campbell. The Communist Party of Great Britain: A Historical Analysis. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2017.
• Morgan, Kevin. Bolshevism and the British Left. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006.
• Renton, David. Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti‑Nazi League 1976–1982. London: Routledge, 2018.

Black Britain, Race, and Labour History

• Bryan, Beverley, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe. The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. London: Virago, 1985.
• Eddo‑Lodge, Reni. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
• Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984.
• Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. “Race, Class and the State.” Race & Class 17, no. 4 (1976): 347–368.