Eric Hobsbawm was widely recognised within academic and left-liberal circles as an eminent Marxist historian. His notable works on nationalism, especially Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990) and The Age of Capital, are regarded as important scholarly contributions to understanding the development of modern nations. Donald Sassoon, a British historian aligned with the social-democratic left and known for titles such as One Hundred Years of Socialism, serves as a fitting intellectual peer to Hobsbawm. Both scholars operate within a ‘Gramscian’ or left-reformist tradition of historical writing, highly intellectual yet ultimately rooted in the political frameworks of Stalinism and social democracy, rather than revolutionary Marxism.

Donald Sassoon’s choice to include Hobsbawm’s views on nationalism mirrors his own political perspective. His book, One Hundred Years of Socialism, promotes social-democratic ideals and provides a detailed history of European leftist parties. Although information-rich, it endorses reformism as the correct socialist method, considering revolutionary ideas extreme. Like Hobsbawm, Sassoon is part of an intellectual faction within a tradition that has focused on managing capitalism rather than overthrowing it for over a century. Quoting Hobsbawm on nationalism indicates a shared political stance: both are products of the post-war European left consensus, which accepted the nation-state, NATO (initially with some reservations), and capitalist democracy. Neither offers an analysis of how nationalism supports ruling classes in the imperialist era, as both lack a perspective rooted in working-class political independence.

To grasp Hobsbawm’s perspective on nationalism, the insights he offers and the limitations he maintains, it’s essential to consider his political background. Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the British Communist Party, remaining in it even after the 1956 revelations about Stalin’s crimes, when many other intellectuals resigned in horror. As Ann Talbot’s analysis, “Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade,” shows, this loyalty was more than mere organisational allegiance; it revealed a deep-seated hostility to revolutionary politics. In his autobiography, Hobsbawm admits to having the “instincts of a Tory communist,” drawn to authority, order, and subordinating working-class spontaneity to party discipline. He expressed satisfaction at the expulsion of Militant from the Labour Party under Kinnock, and his theoretical journal, Marxism Today, played a key role in shifting Labour to the right, leading to Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Hobsbawm’s view on nationalism is closely linked to the political framework of Stalinism’s Popular Front. When Stalin introduced the Popular Front strategy in 1935, it signified that Communist Parties had stopped pursuing socialist revolution. Instead, it focused on the “national defence” of bourgeois-democratic governments against fascism. This shift replaced the core Marxist principle of internationalism with an alignment to bourgeois nationalism, falsely portrayed as anti-fascism. As Talbot notes, this approach involved defending private property, quelling working-class revolutions, such as in Spain (1936-37), and subordinating workers’ interests to Soviet foreign policy objectives.

Hobsbawm’s political development was profoundly shaped by this tradition, influencing his perspective on nations and nationalism. His scholarly work on nationalism is highly detailed, exploring the “invention of tradition,” the constructed nature of national identity, and the historically dependent emergence of modern nations. However, his framework does not view nationalism as a class phenomenon requiring a class-based explanation. While he documents these elements and provides valuable insights, he does not reach the revolutionary conclusion that, during imperialism, nationalism primarily functions to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie of its own nation.

The Marxist perspective on nationalism was first introduced by Marx and Engels, later refined by Lenin in his critique of imperialism, and defended by Trotsky against nationalist distortions. The phrase from the Communist Manifesto stating “workingmen have no fatherland” is more than just a slogan; it signifies a strategic position: the working class is an international group whose interests unite across borders to oppose capitalism. Lenin recognised that, under imperialism, the national question is closely tied to which imperialist power a particular nationalism supports. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution took this further, arguing that in countries where the bourgeoisie failed to complete their own democratic-national tasks, the working class must seize power and pursue socialist revolution connected to the international struggle. There is no singular “national road” to liberation.

David North’s essay Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm takes direct aim at the theoretical core of Hobsbawm’s method: his fatalism. Hobsbawm reduces history to “what happened,” dismissing the role of political alternatives, parties, and programs. For him, Stalinism, “socialism in one country,” the very foundation of nationalist distortion within the workers’ movement, was essentially inevitable once the German revolution failed. North shows this is not a materialist analysis but an apology for Stalinism: it retrospectively validates every Stalinist betrayal by arguing there was no alternative.[1]

One of the contradictions at the heart of Hobsbawm’s historiography is that, despite his Stalinist politics, he could produce stunning pieces of history. The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, is among the most frequently cited works in modern history studies. Its core message is deceptively straightforward yet truly insightful: many traditions that appear ancient and organic, such as Highland Scots tartan and bagpipe customs, elaborate British royal ceremonies, Zulu political rituals, and nationalist mass events, are actually fairly recent constructs, intentionally created for political aims. These traditions aim to foster a timeless sense of national or communal identity, legitimise authority, and generate public support for the ruling elite’s institutions.

Hobsbawm differentiates between “genuine traditions,” which develop gradually and naturally, and “invented traditions,” which are deliberately created, often quickly, to address emerging social needs, especially those caused by industrialisation and the growth of mass democratic politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. He points out that the Scottish Highland tradition celebrated by Romantics like Walter Scott was mainly a late 18th and early 19th-century invention, enforced by the Lowland and English-educated Scottish elite on a Gaelic-speaking population they had largely marginalised. Similarly, the elaborate ceremonies of the British monarchy, such as the state openings of Parliament and coronation rituals, presented as timeless constitutional traditions, were mainly fictionalised between 1870 and 1914, at a time when the British ruling class feared losing deference amid the rise of mass enfranchisement.

This is genuinely valuable scholarship. Hobsbawm correctly identify’s the functional character of nationalist mythology: it serves ruling-class interests by binding the working class to a cross-class “national community” that papers over the real divisions of capitalist society. In this sense, this chapter makes a real contribution by stripping away the ideological veil from some of the most powerful instruments of bourgeois political manipulation.

Ann Talbot’s article, ‘History in the service of ideology,’ clarifies Hobsbawm’s book on the same subject, ‘Nations and Nationalism since 1780,’ which shares the same intellectual background and has become a key reference point in a significant historiographical debate. This debate contrasts ‘modernists who argue that nations and nationalism emerged from modern capitalist conditions, with “primordialists,” who claim that national identity is rooted in long-standing ethnic, religious, or cultural traditions that existed before the medieval era. Hobsbawm was a notable supporter of the modernist view.[2]

This debate goes beyond academia. Adrian Hastings’ primordialist view in The Construction of Nationhood has an ideological purpose: to tie the nation-state to nature and eternity, framing nationalism as an almost innate biological drive. This perspective seeks to subordinate class consciousness to national identity, viewing it as a persistent element of human psychology. As Talbot mentions, Hastings’ lectures were a political strategy, timed to coincide with the rise of Scottish and English nationalisms in the 1990s, aimed at lending intellectual weight to the idea that English national identity is ancient and therefore inherently legitimate. Hobsbawm’s modernist critique rightly identified this as mythmaking.

While Hobsbawm’s descriptive work offers valuable insights, his theoretical framework remains significantly lacking. He can identify that traditions are socially constructed by bourgeois elites, colonial administrators, or nationalist intellectuals, but cannot fully explain why the working class accepts and internalises these invented nationalist traditions. This gap exists because he lacks a solid Marxist theory of ideology and class consciousness, a shortcoming rooted in his Stalinist background. The concept of “invention” functions mainly as a sociology of deception: elites create false memories, and populations accept them. Although this perspective sheds some light, it falls short theoretically for three main reasons.

Marx and Engels argue that ideology isn’t just a set of ideas that can be debunked; rather, it is materially reproduced through institutions like the state, schools, media, churches, and political parties, and interwoven with tangible social relations. The working class doesn’t simply believe in the nation because they’ve been deceived; they perceive nationalism as a genuine force because the capitalist state organises social life around national lines. Workers participate in national labour markets, and social welfare, democratic rights, and legal protections are all mediated through the nation-state. This “invention” endures because real social relations lend it material substance. Although Hobsbawm’s framework powerfully debunks these notions, it cannot fully explain why nationalism persists so strongly once its constructed nature is revealed.

If elites create traditions, it suggests that more educated populations may recognise the invention and disregard it. However, ruling-class ideology does not operate as a simple cognitive mistake driven by false beliefs that can be fixed with better information. Instead, it functions as a form of social consciousness that mirrors the real fragmentation and subjugation of the working class under capitalism. Overcoming this requires organised political effort and the development of a revolutionary party that offers the working class an alternative way of understanding its interests. Hobsbawm fails to provide such a perspective because, throughout his career, he was committed to suppressing revolutionary politics.

The most disastrous “invention of tradition” in the twentieth century was Stalinist nationalism itself. This included the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” the creation of a distinct Russian or Soviet national tradition as the legacy of October 1917, and the alignment of communist parties worldwide with the Soviet bureaucracy’s foreign policy interests. This was a massive, historically destructive fabricated tradition, and Hobsbawm remained a loyal supporter throughout his life. While he wrote insightfully about Highland chiefs crafting tartans to foster Scottish nationalism, he was completely silent about Stalin constructing a Great Russian nationalist mythology to strengthen the bureaucratic caste’s hold on power. This silence is not an oversight but a fundamental limitation of the entire project.

Ann Talbot highlights an important point that goes beyond Hobsbawm’s perspective. The debate between primordialists and modernists, despite its academic focus, conceals a fundamental issue: the nation-state is more than just a cultural or political entity; it also operates as a system of class dominance. As Talbot states, “The nation-state did not fulfil the ideals of the revolutions that created it because the state could not transcend the social relations of its time, those being capitalist relations founded on private property.” The bourgeois revolutions in England, France, and the US, which established the modern nation-state, contained real revolutionary elements—advancing citizen equality, ending feudal privileges, and securing rights. Yet, these revolutions did not eliminate or seek to abolish the class relations underlying bourgeois society.

Hobsbawm can debunk specific invented traditions with great skill. But he cannot draw the socialist conclusion from his own evidence: that the nation-state itself, as a form of class organisation, must ultimately be transcended by a higher form of international social organization — socialism. He cannot draw this conclusion because he spent his political career defending various forms of national-reformist politics, from the Popular Front to Kinnockite Labour.

Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition deserves to be read for what it genuinely shows: that the supposedly eternal and organic character of national feeling is a historical, humanly constructed phenomenon, and therefore capable of being superseded. But it must be read critically, with clear awareness of what its author could not say and would not do. The debunking of invented traditions, without a revolutionary socialist perspective, is merely an academic exercise.

“The Jews and Germany”

A Stalinist historian discussing Jews and Germany raises fundamental questions of historical and political significance. Among all topics Eric Hobsbawm could address, the issue of Jews and Germany most clearly exposes the limitations and political crimes of the Stalinist intellectual tradition he embodied. The destruction of Jewish communities in Germany and Europe during the Holocaust was not a mere natural disaster; it resulted from identifiable, analysable historical and political forces. Foremost among these was the failure of the German Communist Party, under Stalinist leadership, to build a united front of the working class against Hitler. Hobsbawm cannot honestly face this reality because doing so would be to condemn the political movement he dedicated his entire life to.

The Class Roots of Modern Antisemitism

A genuine Marxist analysis of Jews and Germany must recognise that class interests drove the emergence of modern political antisemitism in the late 1800s. As David North’s “The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans’ illustrates, this form of antisemitism was not just a medieval religious legacy but a strategic ideological weapon used by the ruling class. Its target was destabilised sections of the petty bourgeoisie, such as failed shopkeepers, disillusioned artisans, heavily indebted peasants, and worried professionals, whose social positions were being threatened by the rise of industrial capitalism from the 1870s onwards.[3]

The 1873 stock market crash in Germany, along with the high-profile presence of Jewish financiers, bankers, and professionals during a period of rapid capitalist expansion, provided reactionary ideologues with material for demagogic scapegoating. Charles Maurras, a prominent reactionary, plainly explained that antisemitism “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified” suggesting that directing the anger of the dispossessed at Jewish people instead of capitalism was a more effective way to suppress class awareness and reintegrate the proletariat into a “national community” under bourgeois dominance.

The critical point that Hobsbawm, wedded as he is to a culturalist rather than class-based analysis, consistently underweights is this: the most powerful and consistent opposition to antisemitism throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came not from liberal bourgeois opinion but from the revolutionary socialist workers’ movement. As Clara Weiss’s analysis of Mario Kessler’s historical scholarship, The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism, demonstrates, “the most powerful and consistent critique of both antisemitism and Zionism emanated from the revolutionary internationalist wing in the workers’ movement.”[4]

August Bebel famously called antisemitism “the socialism of fools,” emphasising that it was a misguided form of anti-capitalism. It redirected genuine popular anger away from the capitalist system and onto a Jewish scapegoat. This benefited the ruling class by preventing the working class from gaining a socialist consciousness. Hobsbawm inherited this tradition at least in theory. However, his Stalinist beliefs stopped him from recognising the crucial lesson.

Any thorough analysis of Jews and Germany must address how Hitler rose to power. An honest answer also involves examining Stalinism’s influence. By 1933, the German working class was highly organised, with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) commanding millions of loyal workers and supported by armed paramilitary groups prepared for conflict. Despite this, Hitler ascended to power without confronting significant, organised resistance from the working class. Why did this happen?

Peter Schwarz’s lecture, “The Rise of Fascism in Germany and the Collapse of the Communist International,” offers a clear Marxist perspective. The SPD betrayed the working class twice: first in 1914 by endorsing imperialist war, and again in 1919 by aiding in quelling the German revolution and orchestrating the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The KPD, the supposed revolutionary alternative, committed an even more significant betrayal under Stalinist influence. Following the Comintern’s “Third Period” policy that labelled “social fascism” (meaning the SPD) as the primary enemy, the KPD refused to form a united front with Social Democratic workers against Nazism. It absurdly equated the reformist SPD with Hitler’s movement and sometimes even collaborated with the Nazis against the Social Democrats. Their shocking slogan — Nach Hitler kommen wir (“After Hitler, it’s our turn”) — reflected not revolutionary conviction but a disastrous passivity driven by Stalinist sectarianism.

Trotsky was the only major left leader who clearly understood what was at stake and what actions were needed. He consistently wrote, warned, and urged the KPD and its workers to form a united front against fascism. There was still time—because he recognised that Hitler’s victory would not only topple a government but also lead to the physical destruction of the organised workers’ movement and, as history showed, the genocide of European Jews. Unfortunately, his warnings went unheeded, and his followers were persecuted as “social fascists” and “counter-revolutionaries” by the very Stalinist machinery that Hobsbawm faithfully supported.

Hobsbawm was a young man in Berlin when Hitler rose to power in 1933. He saw these events firsthand and joined the Communist Party that same year. Because of this, he was directly part of the organisation whose ‘social fascism’ line bears significant blame for the political disaster that ensued. Throughout his historical writings, he never addressed this responsibility seriously or honestly. His autobiography, Interesting Times, covers his years in Berlin with typical eloquence and memoir-style charm. Still, it lacks a genuine reflection on what the Stalinist KPD’s failure meant for the millions who perished as a consequence.

After 1935, Stalin shifted his approach by implementing the Popular Front strategy: Communist Parties were directed to form broad coalitions with liberal and social-democratic groups to defend ‘democracy’ against fascism, abandoning any independent revolutionary goals. This was justified as the lesson learned from Germany. However, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the Spanish Civil War reveals, the Popular Front was not a genuine attempt to address the root causes of fascism. Instead, it was a cynical adjustment to Soviet foreign policy, in which workers’ revolutionary interests were sacrificed to the diplomatic priorities of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Hobsbawm’s entire political career, from his time in Paris in 1936 to his contributions to Marxism Today in the 1980s, was rooted in the Popular Front framework. This context shaped how he approached topics like “the Jews and Germany.” The Popular Front analysis of fascism, introduced by Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935, characterised fascism as a reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist force driven by finance capital, rather than, as Trotsky argued, a mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie mobilised by the ruling class against the revolutionary working class. By separating fascism from its class roots—particularly its emergence from the crisis of bourgeois democracy and the failure of reformism—this definition hindered the ability to derive truly revolutionary lessons from Germany.

The authentic Marxist tradition regarding the Jewish question is much more extensive and rooted in political principle than what either Hobsbawm’s Stalinist perspective or the liberal and Zionist alternatives suggest. As Weiss’s analysis demonstrates, Marx’s 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’—often misunderstood and misrepresented—actually advocates for Jewish political emancipation against the idealist Bruno Bauer, who opposed granting Jews equal rights on pseudo-philosophical grounds. Marx argued that Jewish emancipation is inherently linked to the broader issues of social revolution and human liberation. The socialist movement that arose afterwards—highlighted by Bebel’s anti-antisemitism stance, the Second International’s mass protests during the Dreyfus Affair, and the Bolsheviks’ abolition of the Pale of Settlement and tsarist anti-Jewish laws in 1917—embodied the most potent practical effort for Jewish emancipation in modern history.

The Goldhagen Problem and the Alternative

A helpful way to analyse the gaps in a Hobsbawm-style approach to Jews and Germany is to consider his subtle similarity to the culturalist-essentialist analysis found (in a simplified form) in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” David North’s powerful critique demonstrates that Goldhagen’s portrayal of an undifferentiated “ordinary German” as the bearer of an enduring, eliminationist antisemitism — like the broader liberal Holocaust historiography — frames fascism as a manifestation of a specific German national pathology, rather than as a consequence of identifiable capitalist social forces during a particular historical crisis. Despite expressing horror over the Holocaust, this view ultimately undermines the working class, because if fascism stems from German national character instead of class contradictions within capitalism during a crisis, then the only political lessons are “eternal vigilance” and safeguarding liberal democratic institutions.

Identity Politics and the Left

This 1996 lecture, delivered just before Tony Blair’s landslide election victory, is not primarily a work of historical scholarship. It is a political intervention, a contribution by one of Britain’s most prestigious “Marxist” intellectuals to the British Labour Party’s internal strategic debate on the eve of a general election. As Ann Talbot’s analysis of Hobsbawm established, his interventions were always “timed and targeted with precision.” This one is no exception. Its purpose is to argue that Labour should drop identity politics, embrace a broader “citizen nationalism,” and present itself as the voice of “the nation.” It is, in short, intellectual cover for the New Labour project.

Hobsbawm concludes the essay by lamenting that Labour speaks with a “muffled voice” regarding Britain and the nation. He approvingly cites Thatcher for having had the “strength” to recognise the importance of offering “hope and action to a puzzled and demoralised people” and questions whether New Labour will “make the same effort to restore and transform Britain.” This represents the ultimate goal and the core insight of Hobsbawm’s observations on identity politics, which contain significant substance worth acknowledging before addressing where his framework may fall short.

He rightly states that identity politics arose as a historically specific phenomenon, primarily in the 1960s, rather than being an inherent aspect of human society. He also correctly notes that collective identities are shaped negatively—by opposition to “others”—and are fluid, contextual, and socially constructed, rather than based on fixed, inherent traits. His insight regarding the Orlando Patterson paradox—where people choose their identity groups yet feel as if they had no real choice—is particularly enlightening. These observations are significant, as they foreshadow many issues caused by the rise of identity politics since the 1990s, such as the fragmentation of the left into conflicting “oppressed groups,” the difficulty in addressing the working class as a whole, and the fostering of resentments among different groups of workers.

Hobsbawm’s primary and most critical flaw in his analysis is his explanation for when identity politics arose. He claims it resulted from the “extraordinarily rapid and profound upheavals and transformations of human society in the third quarter of this century,’ describing it as a “cultural revolution’ and a “dissolution of traditional social norms.’ According to him, these changes left people feeling “orphaned and bereft,’ prompting a search for new group identities to replace fractured communities. He endorses sociologist Daniel Bell’s view that the “breakup of traditional authority structures and the previous affective social units—namely, nation and class—made ethnic attachment more prominent.”

This is a sociological account rather than a Marxist analysis. It describes what occurred without explaining why, meaning it cannot suggest solutions other than restoring a “common identity” through (citizen) nationalism. A truly Marxist explanation points to a more precise cause: identity politics arose as a political phenomenon in direct relation to the defeats of the working class — especially the betrayals by the very Stalinist and social-democratic groups that Hobsbawm’s tradition embodies. The working class was fractured not by abstract “cultural revolutions,” but by the Stalinist murders of revolutionary leftists in the 1930s, the alignment of communist parties with Popular Front politics that suppressed revolutionary ideas, the integration of labour bureaucracies into corporate management, and ultimately the rightward shift and capitulation of these parties in the 1970s and 1980s.

When the working class loses its revolutionary political voice—due to betrayals by its parties, trade union bureaucracies becoming tools of class collaboration, or when “socialism” is associated with either Stalinist tyranny or Blairite managerialism—workers, especially petty-bourgeois intellectuals who might otherwise engage in socialist politics, look for alternative ways to express grievances and organise. Identity politics emerges to fill this gap. It is not an inevitable sociological trend; rather, it is a political outcome resulting from the failure of the revolutionary socialist movement. Hobsbawm cannot acknowledge this, as his entire career was spent within organisations responsible for those defeats. Instead, he offers a passive, culturalist explanation: society changed, people became confused, and they gravitated toward identity groups.

I concur with Hobsbawm that the left must adopt a universalist stance. However, true Marxist universalism differs from the nationalistic version; it embodies the internationalism of the working class as a global entity, with interests beyond national borders. The working class is not a mere “identity group” like gender, racial, or sexual orientation groups. It is the only class in capitalism whose social position—producing all wealth while owning none of the means of production—gives it both the interest and the ability to eliminate all class exploitation.

Any arguments Hobsbawm presented in this book should be assessed in this context. The key criterion is not whether his historical research is erudite and well-sourced — which it usually is — but whether it genuinely addresses the crucial political issue: the Stalinist KPD’s “social fascism” stance and its impact on disarming the German working class before Hitler. Ignoring this question in any discussion of Jews and Germany, regardless of other qualities, results in a fundamentally distorted political view. The real solution is not found in detailed academic histories of national development, but in the creation of a revolutionary internationalist party  the very kind of party Hobsbawm dedicated his career to undermining.

---

[1] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/04.html

[2] ‘History in the service of ideology-Review of The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, by Adrian Hastings

[3] The Myth of ‘Ordinary Germans,'”, A Marxist critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

[4] The Marxist movement and the fight against antisemitism and Zionism- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/03/ajbz-j03.html

“Trump is proceeding now completely illegally. The constitutional framework does not exist for him. He is not restrained by any sort of constitutional norms or legal norms. He is working off of the conceptions which were associated with the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the so-called ‘state of exception.’ The Führer makes the laws. He has the power. He does with them what he wants.”

David North

“Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities – and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought.”

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

“In the eyes of a philistine, a revolutionary point of view is virtually equivalent to an absence of scientific objectivity. We think just the opposite: only a revolutionist… is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution.”

Leon Trotsky-In Defence of Marxism

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay remains one of the most frequently cited analyses of American liberal politics. It’s worth examining carefully because, despite its deeply flawed and class-hostile framework, it contains a valuable insight. Hofstadter accurately notes a recurring pattern in American political history: movements that attribute social grievances to concealed conspiracies—such as Masonic plots, Jesuit infiltration, and Communist subversion. He correctly observes that this tendency has persisted for centuries and spans the entire political spectrum.

However, Hofstadter’s analysis primarily serves as a tool of the liberal establishment to suppress popular discontent. His approach is largely psychological and cultural, viewing ‘the paranoid style’ as a mental disorder, a tendency to perceive enemies and conspiracies. This perspective conveniently avoids addressing a more critical issue: why do millions of people lose trust in official institutions and seek out conspiracy theories?

From a Marxist view, the fundamental causes are social and historical, not psychiatric. Conspiracy beliefs stem from a distorted perception of genuine alienation. Workers feel invisible, unacknowledged, and subjected to uncontrollable forces that influence their lives. Their wages are affected by obscure market forces, and distant financial decisions harm their communities. They perceive their government as serving the rich, their unions as failing, and the mainstream media as spreading misinformation.

When people sense that powerful hidden forces influence their lives but lack the scientific tools of Marxist class analysis, conspiracy theories often fill this gap. The “paranoid style” distorts class analysis that never materialised, serving as a personalised, often racialised alternative to understanding capitalism as a system. Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, wrote during the Cold War liberalism, in an environment that aimed to discredit both McCarthyism and socialist politics by depicting political “extremism” on both sides as pathological. This reflects the logic of the “vital centre” referenced in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 manifesto, which claimed that capitalist liberal democracy was the final, rational stage of history and viewed challenges from the left or right as irrational.[1]

This framework aims to discredit working-class radicalism by associating it with right-wing conspiracy theories, which are viewed as demonstrations of “status anxiety” and psychological projection. Unlike Marxists, who recognise the ruling class and advocate its overthrow, Hofstadter considers such thinking paranoid. The critical point Hofstadter overlooks, due to the limitations of his framework, is that conspiratorial politics arise from a political vacuum. When the working class lacks independent political parties, a socialist press, and revolutionary leaders, and when its official organisations, like unions and the Democratic Party, are fully integrated into capitalism, discontent cannot develop rationally; instead, it becomes irrational.

The Long Shadow of History

Richard Hofstadter plays a key role in the intellectual history outlined by David North in his lecture “The Long Shadow of History.” Hofstadter was arguably the most influential academic historian in shaping the ideological landscape after World War II. North highlights the transition of American liberal and left-leaning thinkers from critically examining capitalism to adopting the “consensus” approach associated with Cold War liberalism.

Hofstadter began his academic journey with genuinely radical ideas, authoring The American Political Tradition (1948) from a critical perspective. However, he quickly became the leading figure of the so-called ‘consensus school’ in American historiography, which asserts that American history is defined more by shared liberal-capitalist values than by class conflict. This shift represents the same intellectual move North describes, removing class struggle as a meaningful category in historical analysis. Unlike progressive historians like Charles Beard, who highlighted economic conflict, Hofstadter framed political radicalism as a result of “status anxiety”, a psychological disorder among declining social groups rather than a rational reaction to class exploitation.

Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955) further discounted the Populist movement as a true agrarian revolt, arguing that it was fueled by status resentment, nativism, and conspiracy theories. This perspective enabled him to restore the mainstream narrative of American capitalism as a benign and progressive system, temporarily sidetracked by the irrational passions of marginalised social groups.

Hofstadter’s most famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964), offers important insights. Initially, it seems to criticise right-wing irrationalism. Still, its underlying goal was to frame all anti-establishment politics as psychological issues, turning serious critiques of capitalism into signs of mental illness rather than rational debates. This view aligned with Cold War ideology, allowing liberal intellectuals to appear rational and objective while dismissing both the socialist left and the McCarthyite right as equally paranoid. According to North, this approach was the simplest option for liberals after they felt discredited by Stalinism, shifting from Marxist critiques of Stalinism and capitalism to a smug, depoliticised centrist stance that considered ideology a mental disturbance.

North’s lecture highlights the social foundation of this intellectual development. Hofstadter and other postwar academics were petty-bourgeois thinkers whose material interests were linked to their roles within capitalist institutions. North notes that this social layer often exhibits traits such as egotism, selfishness, and cowardice, which influence individuals’ participation in this process. As postwar prosperity returned and McCarthyism threatened academic careers, many sought comfort in consensus liberalism instead of engaging in the challenging, risky, and academically rigorous pursuit of true Marxism.

The irony lies in his characterisation of political radicalism as “paranoia” or “status anxiety,” which itself reflects the Cold War era’s suppression of socialist ideas. His work remained within ideological boundaries, effectively supporting them by providing an academic justification for the ruling class’s efforts to delegitimise class-based politics. The phrase “paranoid style” aptly describes Hofstadter’s academic setting, a group of well-paid scholars who genuinely struggled to understand why workers might rightly believe capitalism causes their hardships.

Hofstadter’s Revival

Hofstadter’s essay has seen a significant resurgence during the Trump era, often invoked by liberal commentators to frame MAGA as a form of collective mental illness. This interpretation is even more politically naive than the original. It enables the Democratic Party and the broader liberal establishment to avoid responsibility for social issues such as deindustrialisation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse, and ongoing wars, which fuel Trump’s anger. Labelling it “paranoia” is a dismissive stereotype that shields the ruling class from accountability. Hofstadter identified the symptom but wrongly diagnosed it as a mental disorder, recommending liberal rationalism as the remedy.

When Trump descended the escalator in 2015 and eventually won the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024, the American liberal intelligentsia swiftly turned to Hofstadter’s work. His essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, was extensively reprinted, cited, and regarded as essential for understanding the Trump phenomenon. The dominant perspective was that Trump embodies a modern expression of America’s irrational, conspiratorial, and “paranoid” tendencies with QAnon, birtherism, and MAGA mythology viewed as contemporary equivalents of McCarthyism and anti-Masonic movements. Prominent outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and many liberal commentators articulated this interpretation with apparent satisfaction.

In March 2016, David North examined Trump’s Super Tuesday surge. He questioned not why millions of workers hold skewed or irrational beliefs, but why the genuine, justified anger of the working class has been directed towards a right-wing demagogue instead of a socialist movement. North stated, “More than any other Republican candidate, Trump has tailored his message to resonate with the intense anger and frustration of tens of millions of Americans who feel quite rightly neglected and scorned by a political system that overlooks their daily issues.”

Hofstadter’s framework aims to discourage this kind of statement. Labelling a Trump supporter as “paranoid” shifts the debate from social and political issues—like deindustrialisation, wage stagnation, the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial collapse and bailouts, and ongoing conflicts—toward alleged mental flaws within the working class. This effectively redirects attention away from objective problems, serving as a strategy used by the ruling class.

North asked , “Why haven’t workers turned left despite all this suffering?” The answer isn’t in their minds but in the deliberate dismantling of political tools that could have offered them a left alternative. The Democratic Party had long neglected the working class. Under Obama, who promised “change,” the administration bailed out Wall Street, expanded drone strikes, deported more immigrants than any previous president, and oversaw the largest wealth transfer upward in U.S. history. Corporate interests co-opted Unions. The pseudo-left, including the DSA, the Sanders campaign, and the NGO-industrial complex, diverted political energy back into the Democratic Party and suppressed it. As North observed: “The essential characteristics of this political milieu are complacency, self-absorption, and, above all, contempt for the working class.”

When the working class has no party, no press, no socialist leadership, and every official institution claiming to represent it has betrayed it, a right-wing demagogue who at least names the enemy (even if he names it falsely) will find an audience. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a distorted, nationalist, scapegoating substitute for a class analysis that was never provided. The Hofstadter framework, by calling this “paranoia,” performs exactly the function it is meant to perform: it insulates the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment from accountability.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” fits within a long tradition of fascist-style national mythology. As North notes, “one of the critical elements of all fascist movements is extreme nationalism and the promotion of miraculous cures to capitalism’s problems on a national scale.” Hitler aimed to restore Germany’s greatness after the Treaty of Versailles; Trump seeks to revive America’s greatness after decades of deindustrialisation and imperial decline. In both instances, the “restoration” is a nationalist myth that masks the true cause of workers’ struggles — the capitalist system itself — and shifts blame onto scapegoats such as immigrants, minorities, foreign powers, and “globalists.”

The ideological function of the “paranoid style” revival in the Trump era can be stated plainly: It pathologises the working class rather than analysing the social conditions that produce political irrationalism. It transforms a political and economic crisis into a cultural or psychological one, thereby making it invisible to social analysis and immune to socialist remedy.

It rehabilitates liberalism as the rational alternative as though the “vital centre” of Clinton, Obama, and Harris hadn’t produced the very conditions that generated Trump. Hofstadter’s framework always points back to the defence of existing institutions, existing parties, and the existing economic order. “Extremism” on both ends is pathological; the centre is healthy. This is ideologically indistinguishable from the Cold War liberalism that Hofstadter himself served.

It disarms the working class by teaching workers that their own anger is a symptom of disease rather than a legitimate response to exploitation. Millions of workers who correctly understand that powerful, hidden forces control their lives — that decisions are made in Wall Street boardrooms that destroy their communities, that politicians lie to them, that wars are launched for interests other than theirs — are told their perception is “paranoid.” The Marxist response is to say: your perception is correct, but your analysis of who is responsible and what must be done is wrong. That is a political task, not a psychiatric one.

As North insisted from the moment Trump emerged, the answer to the far right is not a return to the liberal centre  it is the construction of a revolutionary socialist party capable of giving the working class a scientific understanding of its situation and a program for fighting back. Trump is not an aberration from American capitalism; he is its product. He is the political form capitalism takes when its contradictions reach a breaking point, and the working class has been left without a genuine alternative. Defeating fascism requires abolishing the conditions that produce it  which means abolishing capitalism itself.

Hofstadter’s liberal rationalism has never built a single rank-and-file committee, never organised a single strike, never told a single worker the truth about who actually runs the country and why. As an analytical tool for the left, it is worse than useless  it is a weapon pointed in the wrong direction.

---

[1] Revisiting The Vital Centre by Kevin Mattson- http://www.csun.edu/~twd61312/mattson.htm

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a significant piece in 20th-century American literature. Viewing it through a Marxist lens reveals insights that traditional literary criticism, whether formalist or rooted in modern identity politics, might miss. To fully understand the novel, it is essential to consider its historical context.

David Walsh notes that Hemingway developed his voice during a time when “the global capitalist system entered a widespread and historic decline, characterised by the intense violence and destruction of World War I.” The war caused over 16 million deaths, led to the fall of four empires, and sparked revolutionary upheavals across Europe that challenged the capitalist elite’s ability to control. These included the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, which Hemingway also referenced in his letters.[1]

In 1922, Ernest Hemingway, then a young reporter for the Toronto Star, was dispatched to cover postwar Germany, three years after the murders of January 15, 1919. In his reports and letters from that period, Hemingway openly discussed the political atmosphere in the Weimar Republic, expressly mentioning the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He described Berlin’s environment, noting how discussions about the killings were common in cafes, and highlighted that those responsible remained unpunished—an indicator of the widespread corruption in the new German government. His personal letters reveal a young man’s moral outrage over the overt counterrevolutionary violence carried out in the name of preserving “order.”

The novel’s émigré characters, Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, Mike Campbell, and Bill Gorton, are more than just lively bohemians drifting through Paris cafes and Pamplona bullfights. They embody the remnants of a social order that led a generation into brutal slaughter in pursuit of rival imperialist ambitions, offering no real justification for the mass casualties. Their excessive drinking, shallow romantic pursuits, and constant travelling stem from an awareness that the civilisation that shaped them is fundamentally morally corrupt. The term “Lost Generation” represents more than their personal stories; it signifies a deep social and historical crisis.

Hemingway’s distinctive minimalist prose was more than just a stylistic choice; it symbolised a rejection of the old order that caused brutal conflicts. Walsh highlights that this style conveyed a disdain for oppressive societal norms responsible for violence. After World War I, the elaborate patriotic rhetoric used to justify sending young men to war became fully discredited. Hemingway’s terse, anti-rhetorical sentences acted as a silent protest against the falsehoods of capitalist civilisation. His famous “iceberg theory” suggests that more lies lie beneath the surface than are visible, reflecting a world where official language often served as a means of widespread deception.

This lends the novel a subtly devastating critical perspective. Nothing in The Sun Also Rises is ever explicitly stated: the war’s horror, Jake’s wound (rendered impotent by combat), and the difficulty of authentic human connection in a society driven by money and social status—all of it exists beneath the surface of concise, “matter-of-fact” dialogue. The understated tone serves as the social critique.

Money, Class, and the Illusion of Freedom

A detailed analysis of the novel reveals that its characters are not truly without class. Their so-called freedom to move between Paris and Pamplona, dine at upscale cafes, or follow the bullfighting scene is actually a constructed sense of liberty. These contradictions create much of the story’s tension. Mike Campbell is depicted as impoverished. Robert Cohn’s social anxiety stems from his fears related to his class status as a wealthy American Jew within European aristocratic circles. The novel’s depiction of him also reflects some period anti-Semitism and shows how class resentment and ethnic bias are connected.

Brett Ashley’s ‘liberation’ as a sexually liberated woman mainly stems from her social status, and it does not lead to her genuine happiness. The bullfight, or corrida, is the only part of the novel that really highlights values like skill and courage traits that go beyond financial influence, which explains why Hemingway’s characters find it so engaging. The novel consciously avoids passing moral judgment on this subject. Walsh points out that Hemingway believed ‘if a writer knows something well, he can omit key details, which enhances the overall impact.’ The crucial element missing here is the economic basis of this ‘freedom.’ Readers instinctively sense the significance of what has been omitted.

The Limits of Individual Rebellion

From a Marxist view, the most authentic and significant aspect of The Sun Also Rises is also its main flaw: it vividly shows the tragedy of bourgeois society. However, it offers no remedy besides stoic acceptance. The well-known ending, with Brett lamenting, “we could have had such a damned good time together,” and Jake’s touching reply, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” is among the most honest conclusions in American literature. It fully rejects false comfort but ultimately signifies a dead end.

Walsh describes this as representative of Hemingway’s overall perspective: “The moral and artistic mission Hemingway began in the early 1920s was founded on the belief that personal courage and strength are essential for success. However, this view conflicted with the complex political problems of the 1930s and 1940s and proved inadequate.” 

The Sun Also Rises highlights this limitation both artistically and meaningfully. The characters are unaware of their social shortcomings and do not see their suffering as tied to larger societal issues. Instead, their reactions to the war’s destruction include seeking sensory pleasures, embracing expatriate bohemia, and adopting stoicism, where bullfighting serves as a symbolic stand-in for political involvement.

This flaw is not exclusive to Hemingway; it reveals a wider issue in petty-bourgeois modernism. Although leading modernists showed remarkable insight into problems in capitalist society, their focus on individualism often closed their eyes to underlying class dynamics, limiting their ability to propose effective solutions. As Walsh notes in his review of the PBS documentary on Hemingway, “If Hemingway ultimately ranks below Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald in your view, it partly stems from a less critical stance towards American society.”[2]

 Limits of Academic “Political Unconscious” Criticism

It’s essential to briefly examine the dominant academic perspective today, which tends to reduce ‘The Sun Also Rises’ to issues like toxic masculinity, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. This view tends to confuse surface-level symptoms with deeper problems. Although the novel does depict some prejudices relevant to its time and setting, focusing solely on these superficial elements through identity politics restricts a fuller understanding. It neglects the social forces that shape these prejudices and overlooks the novel’s deeper themes. Rather than offering a comprehensive social or historical critique, it simply categorises behaviours as acceptable or unacceptable based on identity.

Marc Baldwin’s “Hemingway’s Political Unconscious” exemplifies Western Marxist academic criticism using Fredric Jameson’s framework to analyse literature. The article makes a valuable contribution by challenging the view of Hemingway as simply an apolitical craftsman of concise, masculine prose. It emphasises that literary form is inherently infused with ideology. The core argument—rooted in Lukács, Eagleton, and Jameson—that “the true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than the abstractable content”—is a significant insight of Marxist aesthetics. The recognition that Hemingway’s impressionism, his famous “iceberg principle,” and his narrator’s silences are not merely aesthetic choices but are ideologically charged ways of hiding historical contradictions represents a notable progression beyond formalist or purely biographical critiques.[3]

The article points out the shortcomings and distortions in academic Western Marxism, especially within the Jamesonian school, when it fails to adopt a truly materialist perspective on literature. Baldwin accurately observes that Hemingway’s narrator, Jake Barnes, does more than observe; he actively constructs his reality through selective, reifying actions—breaking down people into body parts, transforming social relations into impressionistic sensations, and blending historical time into the “perpetual now.”

This process reflects Lukács’ concept of reification, in which capitalist social relations transform human beings and relationships into commodified objects—abstract, interchangeable units. Baldwin’s interpretation of the Pamplona scene, where Jake reduces the gay men to synecdochic fragments such as “white hands, wavy hair, white faces,” offers a clear illustration of how Jake’s attitude sustains the ideological frameworks of his system.

The connection between the “perpetual now” and ideological mystification is significant. Baldwin rightly notes that a prose style that neglects historical context, presenting the world as a continuous, shimmering surface of sensations, obscures acknowledgement of historical change, class struggle, and social contradictions that impact the characters. His statement that “Ideology needs its subjects to reside in the perpetual now” is a sharp and perceptive observation.

The main theoretical concern in the article is its reliance on Jameson’s structuralist, psychoanalytic Marxism, which treats the text as a self-contained system of ideological mechanisms. It fails to genuinely engage with the historical social forces that influenced Hemingway’s development as a writer. Although Jameson’s approach is sophisticated, it resembles what Trotsky referred to as formalist Marxism, since it primarily analyses ideology through narrative structure. Nonetheless, it overlooks the actual class dynamics and historical circumstances that shaped Hemingway’s development.

David Walsh offers a more realistic view. In his article celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Hemingway’s death, Walsh places Hemingway within a historical context: as a writer influenced by the imperialist slaughter of World War I, aiming to create a new literary honesty suited for a world where the old ruling-class beliefs were exposed as murderous lies. Walsh notes that Hemingway’s succinct style carried “a both moral and political dimension, inherently connected with revulsion against the old order responsible for the brutal conflict and with the revolutionary waves that dismantled empires.” This shows a materialist outlook that Baldwin completely lacks. For Baldwin, silences and omissions are ideological tools used to maintain bourgeois dominance. In contrast, Walsh views them as formal symbols of a real historical struggle—a sincere effort by an artist to confront a broken world and find truthful language amid chaos.

Baldwin’s framework also fails to sufficiently distinguish between how ideology influences an external writer and what an artist intentionally or unintentionally explores. Hemingway was not simply a vessel for middle-class ideology. As Walsh observes, he was genuinely sensitive to “the moral atmosphere of the time,” which often placed him at odds with the ruling elite. The FBI kept him under surveillance for decades. Although his portrayal of the Spanish Civil War was affected by his alignment with Stalinism, it still reflected an earnest engagement with the antifascist movement. “For Whom the Bell Tolls” faced criticism from the Stalinist press because some subtle elements of the GPU’s brutal tactics subtly appeared in the novel, despite Hemingway’s political limitations.

This exposes a deeper flaw in Jamesonian cultural Marxism: it frequently blurs the distinction between authentic artistic achievement and ideological facade. The most significant Marxist aesthetic works—like Trotsky’s *Literature and Revolution*, Plekhanov’s writings on art, and Lukács’s early works—argue that great art can transcend the class biases of its creator, enabling an artist to convey truths beyond their own ideological viewpoint. Hemingway, in his prime—such as in the Nick Adams stories, *A Farewell to Arms*, and much of *The Sun Also Rises*—exemplifies this. The silences Baldwin interprets as merely ideological repression are also, at their best, a formal reflection of something emotionally and historically genuine: the deep shock experienced by individuals whose worlds have been shattered yet are unable to express clearly what has happened to them.

According to a deeper Marxist interpretation, Hemingway’s decline as a writer in the 1930s and later periods is seen as more of a political and historical failure rather than an aesthetic one. His connection to American celebrity culture, his quasi-Stalinist position during the Spanish Civil War, and his misinterpretation of the Trotskyist critique of Popular Front politics restricted his understanding. These issues eventually resulted in a defensive attitude, cynicism, and reticence—traits Baldwin identifies as fundamental to his approach from the start. This approach was well-suited to the post-World War I period. Still, it became increasingly inadequate during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s, which demanded a broader, more historically conscious artistic outlook. Hemingway failed to rise to this challenge, not mainly because of his narrative style, but because he lacked the necessary political insights.

In summary, Baldwin’s article presents a complex Marxist academic critique that sheds light on key aspects of Hemingway’s writings. However, it replaces genuine historical materialism with a focus on structural ideology critique, thereby overlooking Hemingway’s true literary accomplishments and the specific historical factors behind his limitations and decline. The WSWS approach to literary criticism—grounded in the actual history of the 20th century, including Stalinism’s role in betraying workers and confusing the intelligentsia—provides a more profound and accurate framework for understanding a writer like Hemingway.

Conclusion

The Sun Also Rises remains a crucial read, not despite its flaws but because of them. It is among the most honest accounts of how World War I affected a generation and, by extension, the concept of bourgeois civilisation itself. Its deep pessimism is a form of honest truth-telling. However, it cannot offer what only the Marxist movement could provide then and still can: an understanding of the class forces behind the catastrophe and a plan to overcome them through revolutionary unity of the international working class. This is not a critique of Hemingway’s talent — rather, it acknowledges what art alone cannot achieve, emphasising the ongoing need for political struggle.

Notes

Hemingway on PBS: The American writer who sought “the truest sentence that you know” http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/hemi-a10.html

---

[1] Fifty years since the death of Ernest Hemingway- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/07/hemi-j06.html

[2] Hemingway on PBS: The American writer who sought “the truest sentence that you know”- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/10/hemi-a10.html

[3] “To Make It into a Novel… Don’t Talk about It”: Hemingway’s Political Unconscious

Author(s): Marc D. Baldwin  The Journal of Narrative Technique , Fall, 1993, Vol. 23, No. 3

Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys’ book, History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism (Pluto Press, 2007), compiles essays that defend the revolutionary tradition against the anti-Marxist historiography that emerged after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. The contributors challenge the revisionist critiques of the French and Russian Revolutions, as well as the Marxist view of historical change. While the book has significant merit in supporting historical materialism against idealist and post-modernist reactions, it also exhibits notable political and intellectual limitations that a Marxist perspective cannot ignore.

Mike Haynes has been a member of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for many years. The political framework of *History and Revolution* reflects the SWP’s ideological roots, mainly shaped by Tony Cliff, the party’s founder. Understanding this context is crucial, and within this framework, the ICFI should offer clear and pointed criticisms.

The SWP is not a Trotskyist organisation. Cliff’s concept of “state capitalism”—which suggests that the Soviet Union under Stalin evolved into a form of capitalism—was introduced in 1948 mainly as a political strategy. This move aimed to help the SWP stay neutral during the Korean War, rather than defending the Soviet Union against imperialist forces. It was more an opportunist adaptation than a genuine Marxist analysis. The ICFI, led by James Cannon and later Gerry Healy and David North, identified the Cliff tendency as a revisionist deviation that split from the Fourth International, rather than a true continuation of Trotskyism.

This political heritage influences how the SWP approaches the history of revolutions. Since the SWP cannot defend the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state—because Cliff’s theory rejects that it was ever a workers’ state after Stalin—it lacks a clear explanation of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The key contribution of the Trotskyist movement—the idea that Stalinism was a bureaucratic degeneration of a genuine workers’ revolution, not its inevitable outcome—is missing from the SWP’s framework. Consequently, even sincere SWP historians tend to separate the defence of Marxist historical method from their support for the political program of the Fourth International. They can argue that revolutions occur for justified reasons. Still, they fail to explain the betrayal of those revolutions, thus preventing them from drawing the programmatic conclusions necessary for the working class.

Refuting Revisionism champions a left-wing stance advocating for revolutionary history and opposes conservative and liberal revisionist narratives. It challenges figures such as François Furet on the French Revolution, as well as Robert Conquest and Orlando Figes on the October Revolution. While defending the revolutionary historical record against bourgeois misrepresentations is crucial, a Marxist must also scrutinise the underlying perspective to determine whether it truly presents a revolutionary vision for the working class. When examined within the intellectual and political landscape, this stance reveals significant issues.

This collection, featuring Bensaïd advising socialist youth not to focus on studying the Russian Revolution, is edited by the International Socialist Tendency (with Haynes linked to the British SWP and Wolfley associated with the NPA/France Insoumise) and cannot offer that response. The IS tradition has its own core issues with the Russian Revolution, having historically rejected Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR and fluctuated between different forms of accommodation to Stalinism and social democracy.

Revisionism and the English Revolution

The question regarding the English Revolution lies at the crossroads of two major historiographical debates: whether the events of the 1640s truly represent a bourgeois revolution, and what influence the popular radical movements — including the Levellers, the Diggers, and various sects had in it. The “revisionist” school, which gained prominence in British academic history especially from the 1970s onward, challenged the first question by denying that a bourgeois revolution actually occurred. Scholars like Conrad Russell and John Morrill maintained that the conflict was primarily driven by royal mismanagement, court faction struggles, and religious contingencies, rather than by profound structural class conflicts. They also dismissed the idea of a rising bourgeoisie as a form of Marxist teleology.

This revisionist turn was a politically charged academic shift. As Ann Talbot’s excellent analysis of Christopher Hill indicates, the critique of the idea of bourgeois revolution was intertwined with the broader intellectual backlash following the working class’s setbacks in the 1970s and 80s, which gained momentum after the fall of the USSR. The denial of the revolutionary significance of the 1640s was part of a larger ideological effort to eliminate the concept of revolution from historical study.

If we see the English Revolution simply as a misunderstanding between the king and Parliament, the French Revolution as nothing more than a panic among scared nobles, and the Russian Revolution as just a Bolshevik coup, it becomes unlikely to believe that large groups of people can purposefully overthrow an entire social system.

“Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution”

Geoff Kennedy’s research on revisionism and the English Revolution is a significant semi-Marxist critique of the rewriting of 17th-century British history in the late 20th century. His key contribution is his essay, “Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Civil War,” which appeared in the 2007 edited volume History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism published by Verso Books.

Kennedy’s earlier works, like *Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism* (2008), significantly advance the Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. He seeks to contextualise the radical movements of the 1640s and 1650s—primarily the Levellers and the Diggers—within England’s transition to agrarian capitalism, heavily drawing on Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner’s ‘Political Marxism.’ Although this approach is valuable, it also raises critical questions from an orthodox Marxist viewpoint.

Kennedy emphasises the social and economic factors of the English Revolution, challenging revisionist historians who mainly viewed it as religious disputes, constitutional errors, or luck. Unlike revisionists such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and others, Kennedy contends that the revolution had a genuine class aspect, with radical movements representing actual social conflicts arising from changes in land and farming relations in England.

His emphasis on the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, is especially significant. The Diggers are among the most notable early examples of communist ideas in history. Winstanley’s belief that the earth should be a shared resource for everyone, and that land privatisation is the root of oppression. That true freedom involves low-income people working the land collectively went beyond what the bourgeois revolution could accept or achieve. Kennedy rightly sees the Diggers not just as religious eccentrics but as representing the most impoverished groups in the English countryside, those being driven out by enclosure and agricultural commercialisation.

The Levellers, including Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn, promoted a more advanced political agenda focused on the interests of artisans and small producers: popular sovereignty, a written constitution, religious toleration, legal equality, and manhood suffrage with some restrictions. Their Agreement of the People was a truly revolutionary democratic document. Kennedy’s analysis of the connection between the Levellers and Cromwell’s Grandees, highlighted by the Putney Debates of 1647 and the suppression of the Leveller mutinies at Burford in 1649, accurately identifies this as a pivotal moment in the revolution’s class dynamics.

Kennedy’s theoretical framework

Kennedy’s Political Marxism Framework, based on Wood and Brenner’s “Political Marxism,” highlights the particularities of the English transition to capitalism in agriculture. It focuses on the unique role of the capitalist landlord-tenant-labourer relationship, the early commercialisation of farming, and the dispossession of peasants through enclosure. This approach is a significant improvement over simpler base-superstructure theories and effectively links radical movements to specific social relations.

Nonetheless, the Political Marxism framework has certain inconsistencies. Wood, for example, strongly resisted labelling the English Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” in the traditional Marxist sense. She believed the bourgeoisie did not lead the revolution and that capitalism in England developed primarily through agrarian, rather than commercial or industrial, capital. This creates a paradoxical stance: recognising the period’s revolutionary nature while distancing it from the classic Marxist classification. This stance is a partial concession to the revisionist view, but it risks obscuring the global importance of the English Revolution as the first major bourgeois revolution. As Engels stated in his introduction to *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific*, it was the event that first raised the banner of the modern bourgeoisie against feudal monarchy.

The Trotskyist view, as exemplified by Ann Talbot’s interpretation of Christopher Hill, emphasises the importance of a revolution’s fundamental social goals. It focuses on the mode of production it supports and the long-term interests at stake, rather than on whether participants explicitly see themselves as bourgeois revolutionaries or whether the bourgeoisie directly ‘created’ the revolution in a narrow sociological sense. For example, Cromwell didn’t need to be a Manchester manufacturer to serve capitalism’s interests. As Trotsky noted, Cromwell was “a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie” who used the New Model Army as a political tool, often purging Parliament to advance his class’s aims.

The Levellers and Diggers: Historical Limits and Revolutionary Significance

From a Marxist perspective, Kennedy’s work raises a crucial question: what were the social and historical limitations of these radical movements, and what can we learn from them? The Levellers primarily embodied the interests of the petty bourgeoisie — small producers, artisans, and yeomanry who aimed to engage with the rising capitalist system more equally, rather than overthrow it. Their call for manhood suffrage explicitly excluded servants and those on poor relief, representing the rural proletariat and the most marginalised groups.

During Cromwell’s Grandees’ discussion at Putney, the notable exchange between Commissary-General Ireton and Colonel Rainsborough highlighted the class divide: Ireton defending property as fundamental to constitutional rights. At the same time, Rainsborough claimed that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” The Levellers ultimately struggled with this internal conflict, torn between their democratic ideals and their status as property-owning classes.

The Diggers aimed for common land ownership, representing a true communist ideal. However, Winstanley’s version was a utopian form of communism by the dispossessed peasantry, not rooted in the scientific socialism driven by capitalist development. In 1649, the conditions for a socialist revolution, such as a modern industrial proletariat, socialised production, and a working class capable of seizing and managing the means of production, were absent. This isn’t a critique of Winstanley but an acknowledgement of historical limitations. Engels highlighted this in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” noting that many early communist ideas, from Münzer during the German Reformation to the Enragés in the French Revolution and the Diggers in England, voiced the hopes of classes unlikely to have a future in the nascent capitalist system.

Kennedy and Revisionism

Kennedy’s focus on revisionism is a strong point in his work. He rightly recognises that the political motive behind the revisionist school’s denial of a bourgeois revolution is to naturalise capitalism by dismissing the need for violent overthrow. This also aims to undermine Marxist historical analysis during the 1980s-90s, when the ruling class was gaining ground. This same drive contributed to the development of the “end of history” idea and postmodern critiques of historical materialism.

Kennedy’s support for the Marxist framework can be expanded to include an international perspective. As Ann Talbot observed regarding Hill, the limitation of the “people’s history” tradition was its primarily national focus. The English Revolution did not happen in isolation; it was part of a broader European crisis in the seventeenth century. The ideas it promoted—such as natural rights, popular sovereignty, religious toleration, and constitutional government—contributed directly to the Enlightenment and inspired later American and French revolutions. The Levellers’ Agreement of the People was a precursor to the American Declaration of Independence. John Locke formalised the political ideas of the English Revolution into a framework that American and French revolutionaries adopted. Viewing the English Revolution solely through the lens of English agrarian conditions, as the Political Marxism approach often does, overlooks its global significance as the initial stage of the bourgeois revolutionary era.

Overall, Kennedy’s chapter provides a serious and compelling contribution. It defends the Marxist framework against revisionist perspectives, recognises the social significance of radical movements, and clarifies how agrarian capitalism shaped the revolution. Nonetheless, it is somewhat limited by the views of the Political Marxism school, which often dismisses the classical “bourgeois revolution” idea and interprets the revolution too narrowly at a national level. The Trotskyist perspective offers a valuable correction: the English Revolution was a key global event of bourgeois change, whose full significance can only be understood in an international context. Its radical origins—the Diggers and Levellers—also hint, albeit prematurely, at the eventual overthrow of capitalism through deliberate revolutionary action by the working class.

Daniel Bensaïd: The Central Problem

The most notable figure in this collection is Daniel Bensaïd, a leading theorist of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) in France and a key member of the Pabloite United Secretariat. In February 2008, just months before this book was published, he spoke at a forum at Socialist Party headquarters in Paris, alongside Henri Weber, a co-founder of the LCR who had long since become a PS senator and European deputy, openly supporting the capitalist market.

What did Bensaïd say at this forum? He didn’t challenge Weber’s praise of “market freedom.” Instead, he told the audience he saw little chance for revolutionary socialism in the near future, citing the influx of hundreds of millions of Asian workers into the global labour market as a factor that would “permanently lower living standards”—a defeatist, petty-bourgeois viewpoint that dismisses the revolutionary potential of the global working class. Most tellingly, he told the Socialist Party crowd that if young LCR members took a class on the Russian Revolution, “they’re bored silly,” even though he’s a contributor to a book supposedly meant to defend revolutionary history!

This is no accidental contradiction. It reveals the core dishonesty within the pseudo-left’s engagement with Marxist history. Bensaïd and the LCR/NPA tradition evoke revolutionary memory in theory but, in practice, do everything to keep the working class subordinate to bourgeois parties. They present the idea of revolution as a cultural relic, while systematically undermining the revolutionary program as a dynamic political goal. His description of himself at that meeting as a “Leninist rather than a Trotskyist,” along with his attempt to portray Lenin as merely an opportunist, illustrates his aim to distance Lenin from the theoretical lineage of Marxism that Trotsky represented.

Lars T. Lih

Lih is a dedicated scholar whose work on Lenin, especially *Lenin Rediscovered*, offers valuable insights into Bolshevism as an autonomous movement rather than a caricature. His effort to rehabilitate Lenin’s *What Is to Be Done?* from decades of liberal and social-democratic misinterpretation is noteworthy. However, Lih functions as a non-Marxist academic historian; his focus is on illuminating history without linking it to a current political agenda.

His main thesis in *Lenin Rediscovered* is an academically respectable revision: he suggests that the interpretation of *What Is to Be Done?* (1902) as a top-down, elitist plan for a vanguard party—where professional revolutionaries impose socialism on a passive working class—has been mistaken, especially in the West. Lih contends this is incorrect.

He contends that Lenin’s ideas were not revolutionary leaps regarding consciousness but were significantly shaped by German Social Democracy—especially Karl Kautsky—and involved adapting traditional Kautskyism to Russian conditions. The famous excerpt in WITBD where Lenin quotes Kautsky, asserting that socialist consciousness should be imparted to workers “from without” (von aussen), is, as Lih explains, not a groundbreaking innovation but rather reflects the common stance of the Second International.

Lih’s work offers an important correction to right-wing criticisms of Lenin. Yet, limiting the focus to this diminishes our appreciation of Lenin’s wider historical role: as the founder of the Third International, a key figure in the October Revolution, and a successor to a revolutionary legacy continued by Trotsky and the Fourth International, a legacy that still holds significant relevance today.

Enzo Traverso and Geoff Eley

Both are academics operating within the broad field of “critical theory” and left-liberal historiography. Traverso’s work on violence, fascism, and European history is intellectually serious but embedded in a Frankfurt School framework that, as David North has analysed in depth, ultimately leads away from the revolutionary Marxist perspective. Geoff Eley, a distinguished historian of European labour movements, operates within a broadly social-democratic intellectual horizon — his work charts the decline of the left without pointing toward the program needed to reconstitute it on genuine socialist foundations.

Enzo Traverso is perhaps best known for his work on European fascism, revolutionary violence, the Holocaust, and — most tellingly — his concept of left melancholy. His book Left-Wing Melancholia (2016) argues that the contemporary left is defined by mourning for a lost world of socialist possibilities, dwelling in the ruins of defeated revolutions and collapsed utopias. He draws heavily on Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the “left melancholy” of the Weimar era, as well as on the broader Frankfurt School tradition.

Traverso’s observation highlights that many academic and petty-bourgeois radicals are demoralised and disoriented. However, his political conclusions and the intellectual framework he employs to interpret this are deeply incompatible with Marxism. His notion of “left melancholy” interprets the setbacks of the 20th century as indicative of a fundamental rift between socialism and historical progress, implying that the chance for a socialist revolution is either hidden or no longer attainable.

Traverso’s deep engagement with the Frankfurt School deepens this issue. As David North discusses in his book The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left, the Frankfurt School’s original premise was to abandon the revolutionary working class as a key driver of change.

Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, writing during the era of Stalinism and fascism, claimed that capitalism had subsumed the proletariat, hindering its ability to lead emancipation efforts. This change led to a greater focus on cultural critique, aesthetic theory, and philosophical negativity rather than on the political mobilisation of workers. Traverso follows this entire tradition. While his historical work is knowledgeable and occasionally insightful on fascism and memory, its core principles fundamentally oppose the Marxist agenda.

His interpretation of revolutionary violence and utopia also leans towards a moral-aesthetic assessment that detaches from class analysis. For Traverso, the issue of revolutionary violence mainly becomes an ethical and aesthetic concern focusing on how we remember, mourn, and portray it rather than a political matter: considering the class forces involved, the programs promoted or betrayed, and the responsibility of particular political tendencies for specific defeats.

Geoff Eley and the Retreat from Class

Geoff Eley is a prominent historian specialising in modern Europe, with a focus on Germany and the European left. His notable publications include Reshaping the German Right and Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Eley also played a central role in the so-called “cultural turn” in social history, which is linked to the journal Social History. This shift is more controversially associated with a move away from E.P. Thompson’s emphasis on class-based social history toward a focus on discourse, culture, and identity.

Eley’s trajectory offers valuable insights from a Marxist perspective. Initially, his work adhered to Marxist social history, focusing on the German bourgeoisie, the Wilhelmine right, and the structural contradictions of German capitalism. However, influenced by post-structuralism, Foucault, and the “linguistic turn,” Eley gradually shifted away from prioritising class as the main analytical category. His 1994 co-edited volume, ‘Becoming National,’ along with later research on gender, identity, and recognition politics, signified a significant move toward the cultural-theoretical issues that had permeated much of academic social history by the 1990s.

This shift—from emphasising class analysis to focusing on discourse and identity—was not merely a neutral change in approach. It mirrored the broader intellectual retreat of the academic left following Thatcherism, the decline of the labour movement, and ultimately, the collapse of the Soviet Union. The common argument was that “class reductionism” was being replaced by a more “complex” understanding of social dominance. However, what was genuinely being forsaken was the fundamental theoretical framework needed to understand capitalism and identify those with the power to alter it. As the ICFI affirms, the working class remains the only force with both the objective interests and the social influence to overthrow capitalism—a truth no refined cultural critique can negate.

Eley’s “Forging Democracy” offers a comprehensive account of the history of European socialist, labour, and social-democratic movements. Nonetheless, its evaluative lens is mainly social-democratic rather than explicitly Marxist. It portrays Social Democratic parties as the rightful representatives of workers’ hopes, views the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist International as problematic deviations, and remains silent on why social democracy repeatedly let down the working class—from 1914 through the Weimar era, the post-war welfare system, and beyond. The ICFI’s interpretation—focused on the crisis of revolutionary leadership and the working class’s subjugation to reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies—is not apparent within Eley’s perspective.

Critical Theory as an Alternative to Revolution

Traverso and Eley, despite focusing on different aspects, share common ground within a broader intellectual trend that emerged after the decline of academic Marxism in the 20th century. Both are dedicated scholars who critically examine historical issues. They are not mere defenders of capitalism. However, their approaches have shifted towards emphasising cultural critique, ethical considerations, and identity-focused history, replacing the revolutionary Marxist agenda.

David North pinpointed this exact issue in his critique of the Frankfurt School’s political heritage. The complex pessimism inherent in critical theory, emphasising the “administered society,” the colonisation of consciousness, and the seeming impossibility of direct revolutionary action, served as the intellectual framework that led many academic radicals to rationalise their detachment from real class struggles. Consequently, as the WSWS pointed out in its critique of postmodernism and the pseudo-left, there was a “flight from historical truth,” in which objective historical analysis was replaced by discourse theory, memory studies, and melancholic aesthetics.

The true antidote is not a simplistic or mechanical form of Marxism but the genuine tradition: the rigorous historical materialism developed by Marx and Engels, further refined by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the state, and Trotsky’s theories of permanent revolution and revolutionary leadership crises. These theoretical tools do not foster “left melancholy” because they offer an authentic explanation for the setbacks of the 20th century—one that looks forward, emphasising the importance of building the Fourth International, rather than dwelling on the past with nostalgia.

A volume that assembles pseudo-left academics to “refute revisionism” in the seminar room, while its most prominent political contributor assures Socialist Party audiences that revolution is off the agenda for the foreseeable future, is not a contribution to that fight. It is, at best, a holding operation for a demoralised intellectual milieu that seeks to preserve the cultural prestige of “revolution” while having abandoned its political content.

Haynes and Wolfreys are responding to a genuine, politically motivated revisionist attack. As David North explains in detail in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, the USSR’s collapse was quickly followed by a surge of pseudohistorical literature claiming that the October Revolution and the Soviet Union were the result of a criminal conspiracy imposing an alien, unworkable dogma on an unsuspecting population.

History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism offers a valuable contribution to the fight against post-1991 historical falsification, and readers will find much merit in it. However, it faces distinct limitations stemming from the political and theoretical confusions within the SWP tendency. The ultimate Trotskyist response to anti-communist historical revisionism is not found in the SWP tradition but in the work of the ICFI. This includes David North’s The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative to Stalinism? series, and the ongoing publications of the World Socialist Web Site. These works unite the defence of the socialist revolution’s historical truth with support for the political program of the Fourth International—without which such historical defence remains incomplete. 

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

Leon Trotsky- Marxism in Our Time

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

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

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

Lord Byron-Song for the Luddites 1816

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

E.P Thompson

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

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

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

The Real Luddites vs the New Luddism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What connects Müntzer and the SWP?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The British Marxist Historians and Their Limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spain, Weimar, and the Fascist Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attention, Platforms, and the Limits of Critique

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music, Fiction, Football, and Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Geoff Andrews’ new book, Radicals: The Working Classes and the Making of Modern Britain, explores the history of popular radicalism in Britain from the late 1700s to today. Anyone familiar with British history knows that Britain has one of the richest and most debated working-class histories in the world. Studying this history seriously involves recognising a key tension: the ongoing conflict between the authentic revolutionary impulses of the working class and the official leaders’ efforts to suppress, control, or direct these energies.

Andrews is a British academic historian associated with the Open University who has written sympathetically about Eurocommunism, most notably his work on the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and on what he broadly frames as the history of “radical” political movements. His intellectual project is fundamentally one of rehabilitation: rescuing Eurocommunism from historical disgrace and presenting it as a sophisticated, relevant tradition for contemporary left politics. From the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism, this project must be examined critically, because Eurocommunism is not a chapter in the history of socialist advance; it is a chapter in the history of Stalinist betrayal and class capitulation.

Eurocommunism arose in the 1970s, mainly through the Italian PCI led by Enrico Berlinguer, the Spanish PCE under Santiago Carrillo, and the ‘Euro’ faction of the CPGB, whose voice was represented by the magazine Marxism Today (for a time edited by Martin Jacques). Its core idea was to abandon the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and instead pursue a “parliamentary road to socialism” working within bourgeois institutions, forming alliances with social democracy and Christian Democracy, and framing this approach as a sophisticated “renewal” of Marxism adapted to Western contexts.

Eurocommunism was not an accidental deviation; it was deeply rooted in what Trotsky recognised as early as 1938. He noted the dual dependence of Stalinist parties: on Moscow’s subsidies and on the super-profits generated by their own imperialist activities, funnelled through trade union and social-democratic bureaucracies. As the Soviet connection became problematic, these national Communist parties increasingly integrated into their respective bourgeois states. The Italian PCI’s “Historic Compromise” with the Christian Democrats under Berlinguer exemplifies this trend: even as the working class was shifting leftward in the early 1970s, the PCI actively demobilised it and aligned it with bourgeois stability.

The CPGB’s Euros, including figures like Jacques and historian Eric Hobsbawm, served the interests of British capitalism. During the early 1970s, when the working class mobilised, leading to the fall of the Heath government through the miners’ strike and the election of a Labour government, it was the Communist Party that limited every protest to trade union action and parliamentary Labour efforts, refusing to advocate for an independent socialist vision. When Thatcher rose to power and Labour surrendered, the Euros blamed the working class for its “decline” rather than addressing the political issues involved.

Andrews’ scholarly work, including his arguments in 2026 Radicals, fits within a broader academic-left project to dignify the Eurocommunist tradition retrospectively. The typical move is to emphasise Eurocommunism’s criticisms of Soviet repression, its embrace of democratic rights, and its engagement with “new social movements” and to present this as a progressive legacy relevant to today’s politics. This framing is deeply misleading for several reasons.

Initially, the Eurocommunists’ critiques of Soviet repression were more strategic than principled. Their main aim was to make these parties more palatable to mainstream bourgeois politics. Those Euros who opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had previously been steadfast Stalinists decades earlier. Their claims to democratic values were driven by opportunism rather than genuine belief.

Second, the “new social movements” promoted by the Eurocommunists, such as identity politics, feminism disconnected from class analysis, and environmentalism as a replacement for socialist politics, were actually the tools used to fragment independent working-class politics. These movements scattered opposition to capitalism into various single-issue campaigns, each manageable within bourgeois democratic frameworks. What Andrews may see as a broadening of radicalism was, in fact, a narrowing and abandonment of the aim of socialist transformation in favour of managing capitalism more humanely.

Third, and crucially, the concept of the “parliamentary road to socialism” promoted by Eurocommunism has been discredited by history. The PCI’s “Historic Compromise” did not lead to socialism but resulted in austerity, which ultimately reinforced Italian capitalism. The CPGB’s Euro sector undermined Britain’s only political tradition capable of challenging Thatcherism with a socialist alternative, and it also contributed to the Labour Party’s shift towards Blair. Italy’s successor party, the Communist Refoundation (Rifondazione Comunista), tried to revitalize left politics within the same framework, but by joining the Prodi government in 2006, it became fully integrated into bourgeois politics, as noted by WSWS, and adopted the very austerity and military policies it initially opposed.

Academic work that rehabilitates this tradition, despite its nuanced discussion of internal debates and sympathy for the genuine idealism of individual participants, serves an ideological role today. It portrays the dead ends of the pseudo-left as viable options. Andrew’s apology for pseudo-left politics permeates the rest of the book. Britain’s ruling class, uniquely positioned atop the world’s first imperialist power, was able to cultivate within the workers’ movement an “aristocracy of labour,” a privileged layer of trade union leaders and reformist politicians who “preached the virtues of class collaboration and implacable hostility to Marxism and revolution.” This was not incidental to British working-class history; it was its defining structural feature, and it ultimately determined the character of the Labour Party itself: a bourgeois workers’ party, resting on mass working-class organisations but committed to the defence of capitalism.

However, this history also includes explosive revolutionary episodes that directly contradict the idea of British workers as inherently moderate and inclined toward parliamentary methods. In Britain, the Chartist movement emerged as the first mass working-class political movement in history. Over a decade, as Trotsky explained, it encapsulated the full spectrum of proletarian struggle, from parliamentary petitions to armed insurrection. The Newport Rising of 1839, where about 10,000 armed workers marched on Newport, represents the most significant revolutionary challenge to British rule in the 19th century and demonstrates the genuine revolutionary potential of the British working class when reformist politics did not bind it.

One of the most important books in this rich history is Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It is considered one of the most significant works of socialist literature in English and deserves a thorough and enthusiastic review. Robert Tressell, whose real name was Robert Noonan (1870–1911), was an Irish-born house painter and sign-writer. He spent his last years in Hastings, on England’s south coast, working in the construction industry under challenging conditions of poverty and instability. From 1906 to 1910, he wrote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, creating a manuscript of over 250,000 words in his free time, often after long, physically exhausting work shifts, by candlelight and in longhand. He died of tuberculosis in Liverpool in 1911 at age 40 while on his way to Canada, not knowing whether his book would be published. It was finally published in 1914 in a heavily abridged form, with the full original edition only appearing in 1955.

This biographical detail functions as a concise political statement. Tressell was a worker with a keen socialist perspective, a deep understanding of his class, and exceptional literary talent. However, the capitalist social system he sharply critiqued ultimately frustrated and destroyed him before his work could reach a broader audience. The book acts both as a critique of that system and a tribute to the working class’s capacity to think, analyse, and resist. It holds a special place in my own political growth, as it was the first book my father gave me.

The book functions on two levels at once. Primarily, it is a detailed, realistic novel about working-class life, one of the most precise and unsentimental depictions of manual labour, poverty, workplace dynamics, and the daily hardships of wage labour in English literature. Tressell writes from experience. He is familiar with the smell of paint, the heaviness of a ladder, the petty abuses of supervisors, and the anxiety of seasonal unemployment. He understands how poverty damages relationships, erodes dignity, and fosters the servility that allows for continued exploitation. The “philanthropists” referenced are the workers themselves, who, through passivity, deference, and acceptance of the current system, “philanthropically” give their surplus value to their employers.

On a different level, the book serves as an extensive exercise in socialist education. Owen’s well-known “Great Money Trick” chapter, where he demonstrates, using bread pieces as raw materials along with wages and commodities, how the capitalist system operates, how surplus value is created, and why workers remain in poverty under capitalism, is among the most brilliant examples of popular Marxist explanation ever written. Tressell transforms Marx’s theory of surplus value, as detailed in Capital, into a political economy that is so vivid and tangible that it has educated countless workers about the core mechanism of their exploitation.

What makes The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists truly remarkable and different from sentimental or patronising portrayals of the working class is its complete refusal to romanticise or idealise its characters. Owen’s colleagues are not noble victims waiting for salvation. Throughout most of the book, they serve as obstacles to socialist awareness, eagerly echoing the ruling class’s prejudices. They ridicule Owen’s socialism, vote Tory or Liberal, and are wary of anyone questioning the current system.

Tressell’s honesty here isn’t pessimism but a serious political stance. He recognises that working-class consciousness isn’t naturally revolutionary; that ideology is a tangible force; and that capitalist society systematically shapes workers’ ideas to reflect the ruling class. The main role of socialists is to engage in patient, persistent work of political education and persuasion. Owen isn’t a messianic figure who suddenly awakens his class with one speech. Instead, he debates, faces rejection, debates again, and endures the frustration of seeing men vote against their own interests. Yet, he never gives up.

This passage distils the core issue of revolutionary leadership into a literary form, reflecting a perennial challenge faced by the working-class movement from the Chartists onward. The working class holds both the social power and the objective interest to revolutionise society. Yet it has historically lacked a political party and a program to elevate its profile and unify its efforts globally. Owen, depicted as a socialist advocate in a small town, cannot solve this challenge alone, and the novel candidly acknowledges this limitation.

From a revolutionary Marxist perspective, the book also has genuine limitations that merit honest examination, not to diminish its value, but to understand it accurately. Tressell wrote during the era of the Second International, before the pivotal events of 1914 (when most socialist parties supported their ruling classes during the imperialist war and the International was betrayed) and 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution). His socialist views, like those of many progressive workers in Edwardian Britain, combined Marxist economic analysis with the ethical socialism of the Independent Labour Party, a form of socialism driven by moral outrage at capitalism’s injustices as much as by scientific understanding of its mechanics. Owen comprehends exploitation with notable clarity; however, his vision of the alternative, the “socialist” society to replace capitalism, remains somewhat vague, more an ethical aspiration than a detailed plan.

More importantly, the novel’s politics do not engage with questions about the state, revolutionary power, or the international aspects of the class struggle. Owen tries to persuade his fellow workers through argument. Still, the essential issues of how the working class can seize and wield power, which political party and program are necessary for this, are largely unexamined. This isn’t a critique of Tressell personally,

 these questions were only definitively answered through the experience of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Communist International. However, reading the book in isolation can lead to a reformist view: the belief that the working class merely needs education in socialism and that this education will automatically lead to socialist transformation.

The history of the twentieth century, including the British labour movement that Tressell so accurately portrayed, shows that merely educating workers, fostering class consciousness, and forming strong organisations are not enough. Leadership betrayals have often undermined these efforts in 1926, 1945, and many other instances. What is missing in Tressell’s political universe is the Leninist idea of a revolutionary party: a disciplined, internationalist organisation based on Marxist principles, capable of providing the working class with the leadership suited to each era.

None of these limitations diminishes the book’s significance. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has remained in print for over a century. Generations of British workers have read it as a revelation, recognising their own lives, exploitation, daily frustrations, and humiliations, all expressed with pinpoint accuracy. It has been handed down from worker to worker, from parent to child, like truly essential books are. During the 1984-85 strike, the Miners’ Union recommended it. Shop stewards have referenced it, and workers encountering socialist ideas for the first time have discovered a connection between their personal experiences and Marxist theory.

This is the book’s deepest achievement: it demonstrates that socialist consciousness is not an abstraction imported from outside the working class by intellectuals, but something that emerges from the working class’s own experience when that experience is honestly confronted and honestly named. Tressell wrote it not as a middle-class observer of people with low incomes but as a worker who was himself one of the “philanthropists”— who endured the same conditions, performed the same labour, and drew from that experience not resignation but revolutionary conviction.

The General Strike 1926

Geoff Andrews’ book aligns with an important political milestone, the 100th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike, marked on May 4, 2026. This centenary has led to many commemorative articles, scholarly works, trade union events, and retrospectives. Interpreting the 1926 General Strike is more than just an academic matter; it is highly relevant to current politics. The way we view its failure today impacts the policy ideas we craft for the working class.

One of Andrews’ chapter titles, “The General Strike and the Condition of England,” hints at his interpretive approach. The “Condition of England” is a long-standing literary and social genre that traces back to writers such as Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, and ultimately to Carlyle and Disraeli. It involves examining what defines England, its core values, current problems, and potential for renewal. By framing the General Strike within this tradition, Andrews likely views it as a reflection of the development of a distinct English national identity and culture, rather than merely an event in the broader international class struggle.

This is a politically meaningful choice that accomplishes several things. It tends to domesticate the strike by minimising its international aspects, such as the Russian Revolution, the Comintern, and the Trotsky-Stalin conflict. Instead, it frames it as a mainly British event centred on British people and traditions. The focus is on the elements of cultural identity, community, solidarity, and moral courage that were genuinely present in the strike—rather than on the political and ideological issues that influenced its outcome. Additionally, it paves the way for nostalgic labour movement politics that view 1926 as a golden era of working-class community and culture—something to mourn and perhaps imitate in spirit, rather than analyse as a defeat with specific causes.

Considering Andrews’ Eurocommunist intellectual background, his portrayal of the Communist Party’s role is probably quite problematic. The CPGB features prominently in the 1926 commemorative mythology as heroic organisers and agitators, many of whom were, at the grassroots level, truly heroic. However, Andrews is unlikely to subject the Comintern’s political lines, such as the Anglo-Russian Committee policy, the subordination of the CPGB to the TUC lefts, and the “All Power to the General Council” slogan, to the rigorous Trotskyist critique it requires. This type of critique is exactly what the mainstream of British labour history, influenced by Stalinist and social-democratic assumptions, has avoided for a century.

Andrews’ connection of the General Strike with the “Condition of England” also subtly prompts us to consider what England might look like a century later. This highlights the book’s relevance to today’s political implications. Currently, the “condition of England” is marked by a deep social crisis: the collapse of the National Health Service, widespread poverty and reliance on food banks, deteriorating infrastructure, an unprecedented housing crisis, and a Labour government led by Keir Starmer enforcing harsh austerity while backing imperialist conflicts. Instead of resisting, trade unions act as tools of corporate management, suppressing any struggles that challenge the existing order.

The key question about Andrews’ framework is: what does he mean by “radicals”? This term is not neutral or straightforward; it reflects a political choice with significant consequences. Andrews’ academic-left background often treats “radicalism” as a broad concept that blurs the important line between reform and revolution. This view groups together Chartists demanding votes, trade unionists advocating shorter hours, Fabians promoting municipal socialism, suffragettes, Eurocommunists, and current identity-politics activists as part of a single progressive tradition of popular radicalism. In this perspective, the working class is seen as representing a democratic, rights-based politics aiming for inclusion and reform within the existing system, rather than its revolutionary overthrow.

This perspective is deeply rooted in British labour historiography, particularly connected to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). While Thompson’s work is a major scholarly achievement with enduring impact, it also presents some limitations. He emphasised the cultural formation of working-class identity, highlighting experience and agency, and championed “history from below” as a useful counterpoint to the mechanistic economism common in traditional Stalinist historiography.

However, his framework often limited working-class consciousness to a specifically national and English cultural context, highlighting links to pre-industrial radical groups such as the Levellers, the Diggers, and Nonconformist religion. It also tended to underestimate the crucial role of a revolutionary international socialist party as the essential vehicle for advancing working-class consciousness to address the epoch’s demands.

Andrews, influenced by the Eurocommunist academic tradition, is likely to push this idea further, drawing on the history of British popular radicalism to advocate for a diverse, broadly defined left politics that goes beyond traditional class-based party structures. Essentially, this echoes the argument that Marxism Today made in the 1980s: the old labour movement has been replaced, and “radicalism” now needs to include a variety of social movements. The future, therefore, lies in coalitions rather than in a revolutionary working-class party.

The general strike symbolises one of the many betrayals Andrews’ books discusses, highlighting how various Labour governments—those of 1945, 1964-70, 1974-79, and 1997-2010—have repeatedly let down working-class hopes. Each government, initially propelled by genuine working-class optimism, ultimately implemented austerity, suppressed strikes, prosecuted imperialist wars, and weakened workers’ political influence. While the welfare reforms under Attlee were notable, they also aimed to stabilise British capitalism after WWII. They were partly funded by Marshall Plan aid, which was linked to Cold War politics. Socialist figures within Labour, such as Tony Benn, acted as safety valves, channelling socialist ideas into the party and preventing the emergence of an independent revolutionary movement.

Choosing chapters for a 241-page book that covers extensive history is always challenging. However, this review must consider the chapter titled “Making History from Below.” The reader understandably needs to understand what the title promises and what it cannot deliver.

The term “history from below” holds significant respect in leftist academic circles. It emphasises uncovering working-class experiences hidden by history and asserts that ordinary people — rather than kings, parliaments, or great individuals — are the true shapers of history. When applied well, this approach has led to meaningful historical insights. However, “history from below” as a method and political stance is not identical to Marxism, and confusing the two has deeply affected how the working-class past is interpreted and the political lessons derived from it.

Andrews, rooted in the intellectual tradition from the Communist Party Historians Group through E.P. Thompson and into the post-Eurocommunist cultural studies environment, inherits both genuine achievements and notable political distortions of that lineage. Recognising the origins of this tradition is vital for evaluating its true potential and limitations. The group’s potential and limitations were perhaps best illustrated in the works of E.P. Thompson and his “Culturalist Turn.”

When E.P. Thompson distanced himself from the CPGB following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he did not shift toward Trotskyism or the Fourth International, the only movements that had actively defended true Marxism against Stalinist distortions. Instead, he gravitated toward what is now called culturalism—a form of historical analysis that emphasises experience, consciousness, and culture as the main frameworks for understanding class, often neglecting the foundational economic and social factors that Marxism considers essential. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is the paradigmatic text. It is a masterwork of historical research, recovering with extraordinary vividness the texture of working-class life and struggle in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But its famous opening declaration — that class is not a “structure” or a “category” but a “historical relationship” that “happens” in human experience — represents a decisive retreat from Marxist materialism. By locating class primarily in experience and consciousness rather than in the objective relations of production, Thompson opened the door to a kind of historical voluntarism: the working class “makes itself” through its own cultural activity, independent of the structural determinations of capitalist production. This is not Marxism — it is a form of idealism dressed in the language of social history.

The political implications were profound. If class is seen mainly as a cultural and experiential category, then questions about leadership — such as the role of the revolutionary party, political programs, or the conscious steering of the class struggle — tend to be overlooked. “History from below” then becomes a celebration of working-class experience and agency, but without analysing whether that experience is geared towards seizing power or is being undermined and betrayed by reformist leaders. This creates a detailed portrait of the class in struggle. Yet, it ignores the crucial question: why has the British working class, despite its militancy and bravery, suffered consecutive defeats throughout history?

Stuart Hall

The line of influence from Thompson to Andrews includes Stuart Hall and the 1980s Marxism Today environment. To be direct, Cultural Studies, with Hall as a key figure, aimed to shift social criticism away from class and toward other social structures, supporting identity politics. Hall was the main theorist behind the CPGB’s move toward Eurocommunism, explicitly stepping away from class-based politics in favour of a framework of “new social movements’ that considered race, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity as equally important and independent from class struggle. His idea of “Thatcherism” as a cultural-ideological phenomenon rather than a class offensive was hugely influential—and confusing—because it shifted leftist theoretical efforts toward the cultural superstructure just as the bourgeoisie was mounting a deliberate attack on the material base of working-class organisations.

Andrews is deeply engaged with this entire development. His “history from below” project reflects this tradition, featuring a genuine humanist sympathy for workers alongside a shift in focus from Marxist economic theory to cultural analysis. It celebrates working-class agency but remains silent on revolutionary leadership. While it seeks to recover suppressed voices and experiences, it implicitly views social progress as expanding democratic participation within capitalism, rather than overthrowing it.

The fundamental theoretical issue with “history from below” as Andrews applies it is the disconnect between agency and programme. While working people do indeed shape history—such as the Chartists, the miners of 1926, wartime factory shop stewards, and Labour voters in 1945—they were all active agents wielding significant collective power. However, an agency without a clear programme does not lead to liberation; instead, it represents energy that can be directed in various ways, including in support of the status quo. The history of the British working class is fundamentally a record of vast collective agency that has been repeatedly diverted by their leadership, which claimed to represent them, into reformist, nationalist, and class-collaborationist paths.

The “History from below’ approach often romanticises this agency while sidestepping the tough question of why it consistently failed to effect revolutionary societal change. Answering this requires more than cultural analysis; it demands a rigorous Marxist examination of the political organisations—such as the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party, and the CPGB that serve as intermediaries between working-class energy and historical results.

These organisations systematically hinder the development of a revolutionary path. This type of analysis is precisely what the traditions Andrews relies on tend to avoid, because it involves confronting the record of Stalinism and social democracy not as misguided but as well-meaning allies, but as agents that systematically subordinate the working class politically.

Andrews’ Making History from Below belongs to a tradition that has made genuine contributions to the recovery of working-class history, but whose political limitations are built into its foundations. It inherits from the CPGB Historians Group the subordination of history to a nationalist Popular Front politics; from E.P. Thompson the culturalist displacement of Marxist materialism; and from Stuart Hall and the Eurocommunist dissolution, the final abandonment of class as the primary category of social analysis. The result is a history that gives working people a dignified presence in the past while offering them no coherent political direction for the present.

George Orwell and the Working Class

The association of George Orwell with “the working class” in Geoff Andrews’s book quickly reveals insight. Orwell exemplifies, in many respects, the ideal patron saint for the politics that Andrews advocates: the Eurocommunist and post-Stalinist academic left that aims to uphold a progressive, anti-authoritarian, morally upright tradition. However, it carefully avoids the revolutionary implications of a truly Marxist view of the working class. This group frequently cites Orwell because he embodies genuine contradictions: he wrote powerfully and sincerely about working-class poverty, opposed Stalinism from a leftist perspective, and despised bourgeois hypocrisy. His political journey ultimately culminated in anti-communism, collaboration with British imperial propaganda, and the equating of socialism with totalitarianism. This ambiguity makes him a complex figure. Any honest assessment of George Orwell must start with what is truly valuable and enduring in his work.

The significance of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia cannot be overstated. At a time when virtually the entire liberal and left-wing intelligentsia of Britain and the West was either duped by or complicit with the Stalinist smear campaign, which claimed that Trotskyists and the POUM were agents of fascism and Franco’s “fifth column”, Orwell had the intellectual honesty and personal courage to tell the truth about what he had witnessed in Barcelona. He saw the Stalinist suppression of the revolutionary workers’ movement firsthand. He was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper and nearly killed by Stalinist secret police. And he wrote about it all with a clarity and precision that earned him the furious hatred of the worldwide Stalinist apparatus and virtual ostracism in British literary circles.

His earlier social writing, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), contains genuine and powerful documentation of working-class poverty and conditions. These books were written from the inside, or as close to the inside as a man of Orwell’s background could get: he actually lived as a tramp, washed dishes in Paris kitchens, descended into coal mines in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Road to Wigan Pier in particular, with its unflinching account of unemployment, malnutrition, overcrowding, and the daily indignities of working-class life in 1930s industrial England, remains a document of lasting value.

By the mid-1940s, Orwell increasingly adopted an anti-Communist stance. Intense pressures characterised this period: the temporary post-war stabilisation of capitalism, the Stalinist bloc’s dominance over the left, and the Cold War’s division of the world into two blocs. These factors compelled socialist and radical thinkers to take sides. Many who had once supported Stalinism, viewing the Soviet bureaucracy as true socialism, now rejected socialism altogether. Similarly, former opponents of Stalin in the U.S., such as Max Shachtman and James Burnham, shifted to the anti-Communist side. Orwell found himself caught up in this shift.

Orwell’s 1946 article, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” sharply criticises the political stance it discusses. In the piece, Orwell concurs with Burnham’s reactionary view that Stalin did not “betray” the Russian Revolution but rather expanded it along its original trajectory—arguing that Stalinism was an inevitable result of Leninism and Bolshevism. Walsh notes that this view was “the basis of one of the great lies of the 20th century.” Orwell also misrepresented Trotsky’s analysis, reducing it to the notion that “things would have been different if Trotsky had remained in power”—a straw man he dismisses while labelling Trotskyists as “ultra-left sects.” By the time Orwell wrote 1984, he openly identified his main goal as critiquing “communism.”

And then there is the list. In 1949, a year before his death, Orwell handed over a list of about 130 prominent individuals he believed to be sympathetic to the Stalinist regime to the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, a secret anti-Soviet propaganda group. As Fred Mazelis’ WSWS analysis highlights, this was not simply due to personal fear or selfish motives. Orwell genuinely believed he was combating totalitarianism. However, in doing so, he adopted the stance that the Cold War required: that opposing Stalinism meant aligning with British imperialism and viewing bourgeois democracy as the “lesser evil.”

The comparison with Trotsky offers valuable insight and clarity. When the US House Committee on Un-American Activities invited Trotsky to testify in 1939, he intended to use the opportunity to promote his revolutionary ideas, not to give anti-communist witch-hunters a list of names. The invitation was rescinded when they realised this. The distinction is more than just personal character; it highlights two fundamentally different political outlooks: Trotsky’s belief that fighting Stalinism must go hand in hand with opposing imperialism and striving for authentic socialism, versus Orwell’s growing view that capitalism, even if flawed, was the last safeguard of civilisation against totalitarianism.

Orwell’s trajectory was fundamentally limited by a structural political challenge that appeared throughout his career. Notably, his identification with the working class was driven more by emotion and sentiment than by firm scientific conviction. He associated with centrist groups such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Britain and the POUM in Spain—both of which promoted “left unity’ influenced by Stalinism and criticised Trotsky’s severe condemnation of Stalinism as “sectarian.” These organisations, characterised by their centrism and political ambiguity, left the working class vulnerable when the Stalinist regime moved to crush the Spanish revolution.

This gap between Orwell’s moral passion and his lack of a comprehensive program is precisely what makes him appealing to Andrews’ political tradition. The Eurocommunist and post-Stalinist left share this limitation: they are strong in moral outrage and cultural awareness but have systematically moved away from the Marxist goals of socialist revolution, worker empowerment, and the formation of a revolutionary international party. Orwell’s brand of socialism—characterised as ethical, English, empirical, sceptical of abstract “theory,” and ultimately leading to a form of despairing anti-totalitarianism that aligned with Cold War interests—served as the literary blueprint that Marxism Today later sought to theorise.

Orwell has been claimed by virtually every political tendency since his death, reflecting his political contradictions. The anti-Communist right claims him as a Cold Warrior who exposed the totalitarian nature of socialism. Liberals claim him as a defender of democratic values and free speech. The social-democratic left claims him as a working-class champion with a conscience. Even sections of the left that should know better treat 1984 and Animal Farm as politically neutral warnings about the abuse of power applicable to any regime, which is precisely how Orwell’s own political degeneration made possible the appropriation of these works by the forces of anticommunism.

Andrews’ framework examines Orwell and the working class, seeking to revive the earlier, more radical Orwell: the documentary writer focused on poverty, the veteran of the Spanish Civil War, the anticolonial advocate, and someone who worked in mines and hop fields. This rendition of Orwell is what the British labour movement has traditionally admired and is crucial for understanding working-class experiences and consciousness. This material is highly valuable.

Andrews’ interpretation preserves Orwell’s political ambiguities and his moral seriousness but avoids addressing the failed policies that led him from ‘Homage to Catalonia’ to the Foreign Office. This approach risks supporting a politics rooted in moral witness and social conscience, which may not provide the revolutionary change the working class requires. Orwell is portrayed as a patron saint of ethical socialism, diverse labour movement culture, and politics grounded in decency and solidarity. While this aligns with the Orwell tradition promoted by Andrews, it also distances Orwell from the revolutionary significance of his most profound work.

Andrew concludes the book with an unusual and somewhat unsettling epilogue. Only when you grasp its significance does something unsavoury become apparent. An epilogue typically appears after the main story ends, signalling that the narrative of the British working class—through the labour movement, trade unions, mining communities, industrial towns, cooperatives, and socialist groups—has come to an end. What Andrews offers is essentially a farewell, a memorial, and a post-mortem. A Marxist must seriously ask: whose conclusion is this, and what political purpose does it serve?

Andrews confronts an undeniable and devastating material reality. The deindustrialisation of Britain, intensified violently under Thatcher from 1979 and maintained by subsequent governments, dismantled the material foundation of working-class communities at an unprecedented scale in the twentieth century. The statistics are clear: at the start of the 1984–85 strike, there were 170 coal pits with over 181,000 employees. Two decades later, only 15 pits remained, with around 6,500 workers. Entire communities—Durham, Lancashire, South Yorkshire, South Wales, and the Midlands coalfields—were not just economically decimated but socially wiped out. In former mining areas, drug addiction affected one in three households. Young people fled, families fell apart, and the NUM was reduced to a shadow of its former self. Trade union membership plummeted from over 11 million in 1984 to less than 7 million, with fewer than 19% of private-sector workers unionised.

This is the material reality of “unmaking”, and it is a ruling-class achievement, carried out deliberately, with a specific political objective. As the WSWS analysis makes clear, Thatcher’s assault was not primarily about economic “modernisation.” It was a conscious class war offensive, prepared for years in advance through the Ridley Plan, aimed at destroying the organised capacity of the working class to resist the globalisation-driven restructuring of capital. The miners were targeted first and most ferociously precisely because they had brought down a Conservative government in 1974 and represented the most militant concentration of working-class power in Britain.

This is where the core limitation of Andrews’ method proves crucial. The “unmaking” he laments was not an unavoidable historical process, a natural force, or an inevitable outcome of technological progress. Instead, it was a political loss—one that involved deliberate actions by the very organisations that professed to represent the working class.

The 1984–85 miners’ strike marked a turning point from traditional industrial Britain to the deindustrialised wasteland that Andrews criticises. It was not lost due to a lack of courage, solidarity, or determination, as the miners demonstrated all three during a year-long fight characterised by extreme hardship, police brutality, financial pressure, and legal attacks. The defeat occurred because the TUC and Labour Party leadership, rather than supporting the strike, deliberately isolated and betrayed it. As detailed by Marsden and Hyland, the TUC opposed coordinated action; dockworkers’ strikes were quickly ended by their leaders, and the miners’ strike was sabotaged, without which no pit could operate, and scabbing would have failed. Neil Kinnock, Labour leader, was a well-known opponent of the strike. The TUC General Council, whose predecessors had betrayed the 1926 General Strike, played a similar role in undermining Thatcher in 1984–85.

This explanation for the “unmaking” clarifies that it was not due to capitalism’s relentless technological progress. Instead, it was a political defeat caused by a class-collaborationist bureaucracy that had long since ceased to defend the working class. As the WSWS analysis states, this bureaucracy effectively became “a police force on behalf of management.” The trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party didn’t just fail to stop deindustrialisation — they actively facilitated it, paving the way for capital’s aggressive assault on all fronts.

Andrews, operating within the intellectual tradition of the CPGB Historians Group, the Thompsonian New Left and the post-Eurocommunist Cultural Studies milieu, cannot say this plainly. To do so would require confronting the entire tradition within which his work is embedded — the tradition of seeking to reform and pressure the trade union and Labour bureaucracy from the left, rather than recognising these institutions as obstacles to working-class interests that must be overcome through the building of independent revolutionary leadership.

Stuart Hall and the Ideological Preparation for “Unmaking”

What makes Andrews’ project especially insidious from a Marxist standpoint is not merely that it mourns the destruction of working-class communities, but that it does so through a theoretical framework that actively contributed to making that destruction politically irresistible. The WSWS analysis of Stuart Hall is essential here. Hall, whose Marxism Today milieu was Andrews’ primary intellectual formation, responded to Thatcherism not by strengthening Marxist class analysis but by systematically dissolving it. His concept of “Thatcherism” as a cultural-ideological formation, his argument that Labour could no longer rely on traditional trade-union methods of struggle, his elevation of race, gender and cultural identity over class as the primary axes of social analysis — all of this constituted, as Paul Bond’s WSWS analysis demonstrates, an intellectual justification for the political adaptation to Thatcherism that New Labour subsequently carried out in practice.

Eric Hobsbawm’s contemporaneous essay “The Forward March of Labour Halted” — celebrated across the same milieu — performed the identical function: attributing the crisis of the labour movement to the decline of the working class itself rather than to the betrayals of its leadership, and thereby providing theoretical cover for Labour’s rightward lurch under Kinnock and then Blair. When the working class’s defeats are attributed to its own obsolescence rather than to political betrayal, the conclusion that follows is not the building of revolutionary leadership but adaptation to the new bourgeois order — exactly the course New Labour took, with the enthusiastic support of Marxism Today.

Andrews’ “unmaking” thesis sits directly within this ideological lineage. By framing deindustrialisation as the dissolution of the working class as such — as the end of a particular historical formation — rather than as a political defeat that must be understood, reversed and overcome, it reproduces the essential move of Hobsbawm and Hall: transforming a crisis of leadership into a crisis of class. The working class is not unmade. It is defeated. These are not the same thing, and the difference is everything.

The ideological basis for “unmaking” these also draws on André Gorz’s influence. In his 1980 book, *Farewell to the Working Class*, Gorz argued that the proletariat as a revolutionary agent had been replaced by automation and the post-industrial economy. A Marxist views Gorz’s argument as a typical sign of petty-bourgeois political demoralisation amid working-class setbacks, not as a scientific analysis but as an ideological reflex. By claiming the working class is now a thing of the past, Gorz and his followers avoided the challenging task of forming a revolutionary party, opting instead for lifestyle politics, green utopianism, and post-class social movements. Even if Andrews doesn’t explicitly reference Gorz, the “unmaking” framework serves a similar ideological purpose.

The Marxist view begins with a fundamentally different premise. Although the demolition of pit villages, steel towns, and shipyard communities caused significant human hardship, it did not eliminate the working class. Instead, it reconfigured and reshaped it. Now, new groups such as logistics workers, healthcare staff, retail employees, transport workers, public sector employees, and gig economy workers have emerged. For instance, Amazon warehouse employees, NHS nurses, Deliveroo couriers, and call-centre workers are still subject to capitalist exploitation; they embody the contemporary working class. They remain linked by the same core class relations as miners and steelworkers, but operate under new conditions that require different strategies for struggle and organisation.

The core change was not the dismantling of the working class itself, but rather the collapse of the institutional structures that traditionally organised them. These included trade unions, which acted as protective entities, and the Labour Party, which served as a symbolic voice for workers. The process was mainly driven by trade unions and Labour bureaucracies, which had long betrayed significant working-class struggles since 1926. Thatcher’s role was to deliver the final blow to these already weakened organisations, which had become hollow shells from within.

The task of this analysis is not about mourning but about constructing: forming rank-and-file committees and a revolutionary internationalist party that can truly represent the working class against both employers and bureaucratic structures that claim to speak for it. This is the lesson of 1926, 1984–85, and every major working-class defeat in British history. It is the lesson that Andrews’ “unmaking” framework, despite its genuine sympathy for working people, consistently inhibits readers from understanding.