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.

Harvey J. Kaye’s The British Marxist Historians, published in 1984, 1995, and 2021, remains the definitive scholarly overview of the CPHG tradition. It covers figures like Raphael Samuel, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and, to some extent, George Rudé and others. This work is a thorough and rigorous piece of intellectual history that deserves recognition for its quality. Nevertheless, it also exhibits certain blind spots tied to its political stance, and a Marxist critique should honestly acknowledge both its strengths and limitations.

A careful reader would first want to know what Kaye Gets Right. His true contribution is to show the coherence of the British Marxist historians as a group: they not only shared an organisation, the CPHG, established in 1946, but also a common set of intellectual issues, methodological stances, and political motivations. These elements led to a distinctive and impactful body of historical scholarship. Kaye rightly highlights their collective challenge to bourgeois historiography, especially the Whig tradition, which assumed class conflict was incidental rather than fundamental to British social history, as a significant intellectual achievement.

Kaye clearly emphasizes their core methodological perspective: a materialist approach to history that focuses on class relations and economic structures. However, what sets them apart from simple economic determinism is their emphasis on the agency of historical actors, acknowledging that workers and peasants are active participants in history rather than merely passive recipients of structural forces. E.P. Thompson’s remark in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class that class is not just a structure or category but something that happens exemplifies this attempt to integrate structure and agency. Kaye correctly identifies this as the central theme guiding much of the group’s most impactful work.

His treatment of Rodney Hilton’s work on medieval peasantry is especially insightful, showing how Hilton used a rigorous Marxist framework to analyse feudal class structures and peasant uprisings in English medieval history. This approach engages productively with continental debates over the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The discussion about that transition, involving Dobb versus Sweezy, along with subsequent contributions by Hilton, Hill, and others, stands as one of the most important intellectual exchanges in 20th-century Marxist historiography. Kaye presents this debate clearly and fairly.

However, this is the point where Kaye’s account falls short. Despite his sympathy and scholarly effort, Kaye fails to fully address the key political context that influenced the tradition: the Communist Party Historians Group was created, educated, and ideologically limited by British Stalinism and the Comintern’s Popular Front policies. This is not just a minor detail; it is the crucial political backdrop that accounts for both their accomplishments and the inherent structural constraints of their work.

Kaye recognises that these historians were members of the Communist Party and views 1956 as a pivotal moment. However, he considers Stalinism mainly as a political atmosphere that influenced their work, which they partly escaped through their scholarship, rather than as a coherent political agenda that left identifiable distortions in their historical narratives. Ann Talbot offers a more pointed critique of Christopher Hill: she notes that the CPHG historians developed their approach within what she correctly calls “People’s History,” a nationalist historiography that “obscured the class nature of earlier rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.” This, as Talbot argues, directly reflected “the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism, and their efforts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis powers.”

This Popular Front framework, promoting socialism within a single nation and prioritising cross-class national alliances over the working class’s internationalism, was intentionally designed rather than accidental. Launched by the Comintern in 1935, it was a strategic approach grounded in a nationalist ‘people’s history,’ exemplified by the CPHG. By framing the history of the English Revolution as a uniquely English revolutionary tradition connecting ‘freeborn Englishmen’ from Winstanley to the Chartists and the Labour movement, it aimed to legitimise Popular Front politics. This approach sought to cultivate a sense of a progressive national tradition capable of uniting different classes toward shared democratic goals.

When evaluated against that standard, British Marxist historians form a significant yet highly compromised tradition. The political context of Popular Front nationalism often limited their ability to make authentic scholarly contributions. They tended to avoid the crucial political issues of the twentieth century, such as the Moscow Trials, the nature of Stalinism, and the Fourth International—particularly at times when these questions were unavoidable. After 1956, their shift toward empiricism, culturalism, and postmodern pluralism reflected an ongoing theoretical and political deadlock. This impasse stemmed from breaking away from capitalism’s subordination but never developing a revolutionary program capable of transcending it.

Kaye surprisingly does not dedicate a full chapter to A.L. Morton in his book, despite Morton being the founder of the CPHG (1903–1987), author of A People’s History of England (1938), and a key figure in establishing the Communist Party Historians Group. This group, formed in Britain in the late 1940s, included notable scholars like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobb, and Dona Torr, and produced some of the most influential historical works of the twentieth century. However, a fair assessment of their legacy must acknowledge the contradiction that these historians operated within and under Stalinist political regimes.

Recognising this tradition’s achievements is vital. Challenging the dominant “Whig interpretation of history,” which sees Britain as a land of peaceful, gradual progress and organic class harmony, Communist Party historians emphasised that British history was primarily shaped by class struggle and genuine revolutions. This marked a major advancement in historical scholarship. Christopher Hill identified the mid-seventeenth-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution, not merely a constitutional misunderstanding. Likewise, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class gave voice to ordinary workers, saving them from condescension and obscurity. These contributions are valuable and continue to deserve recognition.

Ann Talbot explains the Communist Party attracted “minds of the very highest intellectual calibre’ because the traditional institutions of church and state had lost their grip on young intellectuals’ imagination. At the same time, “the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.” These individuals were not foolish or mere careerists; they were talented people drawn to Marxism during a period of profound social crisis. They found at the party a link to the influential intellectual legacy of Marx and Engels, even if it was somewhat distorted.

However, a rigorous analysis must avoid evasion. Morton’s People’s History of England exemplifies the political distortion that Stalinism brought into this historical tradition. As Talbot directly states: “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History,’ exemplified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, where the class nature of past rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders was concealed by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.”

This nationalist framing was driven by more than just an intellectual stance. It reflected the historiography of Popular Front politics, the Stalinist approach of the 1930s and 1940s, which placed the working class under the influence of seemingly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie under the guise of anti-fascism. By creating a continuous, fundamentally national tradition of popular resistance—stretching from Wat Tyler and John Ball to the Levellers and Chartism—Morton and the Group provided a usable historical mythos for a politics that had already forsaken internationalism and the independent mobilisation of workers. The Popular Front needed a history that enabled the “people” to unite across class divisions against a shared national foe; Morton’s history fulfilled this need.

This critique extends beyond superficial comments to address fundamental methodological issues. The tendency to blur class distinctions, prioritise national over global concerns, and trivialise past revolutionary efforts as a vague “people’s legacy’ all originate from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s opposition to Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution and international worker solidarity. In this context, ‘people’s history’ serves as the historical analogue to the Moscow Trials, providing a supposed “democratic’ facade for the systematic betrayal and execution of genuine revolutionaries. Talbot insightfully characterises the group’s approach to Marxism as ‘Jesuitical,’ highlighting their ability to compartmentalise—embracing a scientific Marxist perspective while being limited by Stalinist constraints, akin to Jesuit scientists operating within the boundaries set by the Church, but not beyond.

A key aspect often overlooked in the book is Dona Torr’s significance. She truly deserves to be rescued from historical neglect. Dona Torr (1883–1956) occupies a unique and sometimes defining role within the Communist Party Historians Group. Unlike more prolific writers such as Hill or Thompson, she is regarded as the intellectual maternal figure of the tradition—someone who profoundly shaped its viewpoints, methods, and political stance. Acknowledging her contributions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the Group’s achievements and the notable limitations they faced.

Torr belonged to an earlier generation than the younger historians she mentored. Born in 1883, she was shaped by the pre-war socialist movement and became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. A dedicated scholar with excellent language skills, she spent many years as a translator and editor at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. There, she produced English editions of Marx and Engels’s selected correspondence and other texts, thereby forging a direct institutional link to the Stalinist leadership. Her role was not that of a peripheral ally but of someone whose academic work was closely integrated into the bureaucracy’s effort to shape and control the Marxist canon.

Her most notable historical contribution was *Tom Mann and His Times* (Volume 1, 1956), a biography of the famous syndicalist and labour organiser published shortly before her death. Only one volume was completed, which is somewhat symbolic of its unfinished nature. Nevertheless, her influence on the Historians Group was more prominent through her role as a teacher, mentor, and political guide to emerging scholars than through her publications.

Ann Talbot’s analysis of Christopher Hill explicitly highlights Torr, along with Maurice Dobb, as the key figure who transmitted the Stalinist political perspective to the Group. Hill, Thompson, Hilton, and Hobsbawm all “came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.”

This framing is both precise and significant. Torr was not merely an experienced scholar sharing craft knowledge; she served as the conduit through which a politically skewed interpretation of Marxist historiography was passed on to the next generation.

What did this specifically mean? The main distortion was the subordination of internationalist class analysis to a nationalist “people’s history” framework. Torr’s intellectual background, shaped by her years in the Stalinist cultural sector and her involvement in Popular Front politics, inclined her to adopt this framework rather than a true Marxist approach.

The “people’s history” perspective, evident in Morton’s book and throughout the Group, obscures the class nature of historical figures by positioning them within a continuous national tradition of popular struggle. Even the Tom Mann biography illustrates this bias: Mann was a true working-class leader of international significance, but focusing solely on his story within the British radical tradition overlooks the internationalist elements of his politics and his ties to the syndicalist movement.

Hobsbawm: The Most Revealing Case

Kaye shows great respect for Hobsbawm and considering the vastness and productivity of his scholarly work, that respect is well justified. However, Hobsbawm was more than just a historian who was a member of the Communist Party. His Stalinism was not just an incidental aspect of his life; it fundamentally shaped his political conclusions.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was the most internationally recognised member of the Communist Party Historians Group and, from a Marxist viewpoint, its most influential and politically insightful figure. His lengthy career, numerous publications, sustained membership in the Communist Party until 1991, and later role in guiding the British Labour Party’s ideological transition toward Blairism make him more than just a prominent nineteenth-century historian. Hobsbawm exemplifies the strong connections between Stalinist politics, historical distortion, and the ongoing suppression of revolutionary consciousness within the working class.

An honest evaluation of Hobsbawm starts with his dealings with the Socialist Labour League and Gerry Healy. The clash between the SLL and Hobsbawm was a key political debate in the postwar history of the British left, with stakes that turned on whether the working class would rise from the 1956 Stalinist crisis with a revolutionary Marxist leadership, or whether that energy would be reintegrated into the existing bourgeois political system. Hobsbawm and Healy clearly exemplify the two main opposing sides of this debate.

The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU earlier that year created the most significant crisis British Stalinism had ever encountered. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian workers’ uprising—organised around authentic workers’ councils reminiscent of the October 1917 soviets—thousands of CPGB members faced political upheaval. Among them were leading figures from the Communist Party Historians Group. The pressing questions raised by 1956 were: What is the meaning of Stalinism? Where did it originate? And what should be the future course?

The response to these questions was not merely academic; it determined whether one aimed to rebuild the revolutionary movement on true Marxist principles or drifted into liberal, nationalist, or reformist politics cloaked in terms like “humanism” and “democratic socialism.” As detailed in the document “The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain),” Gerry Healy’s faction, “The Club,” which operated within the Labour Party, was uniquely equipped for this moment.

It was the only political group in Britain capable of explaining why Stalinism evolved as it did, because it was the sole tendency that defended Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet state’s degeneration against both Stalinists and Pabloite revisionists within the Fourth International. Healy himself had been expelled from the CPGB in 1937 for questioning the Moscow Trials and spent the subsequent two decades developing a small but theoretically grounded Trotskyist cadre, fighting on two fronts: against the Stalinist bureaucracy and against the Pabloite tendency within the Fourth International that sought to liquidate independent Trotskyist organisations into the mass Stalinist parties.

In 1956, Healy and The Club acted with remarkable energy. They issued pamphlets, distributed copies of Trotsky’s “The Revolution Betrayed,” and Healy personally travelled across the country, meeting dissident CPGB members and urging them to seek a full account of Stalin’s crimes and to study the true history of the Soviet Union. When Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent whose reports from Hungary had been censored and suppressed by the party, distanced himself from the CPGB, Healy arranged for the publication of his “Hungarian Tragedy” as a widely circulated pamphlet. During the special CPGB congress in April 1957, The Club published a daily bulletin. The Labour Review was reintroduced in January 1957 to foster deeper discussion on the Stalinist crisis and the future of socialism. According to the SEP’s Historical Foundations, Healy’s group was “the only tendency to make any gains from the crisis in British Stalinism.”

The clash between the Trotskyist movement and dissident CP intellectuals, including members of the Historians Group, crystallised during the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, organised by the Socialist Forum. This significant event united a wide range of the British left to debate the implications of 1956 and future directions. David North’s political biography of Cliff Slaughter offers an in-depth account of the proceedings and their revelations.

Barbara Slaughter, who was present with Cliff Slaughter, remembered Healy’s speech: “Healy stated that ‘This is the moment to read books. It’s the time to uncover the true history of the Russian Revolution.’ There was no theatrics; he was very composed and self-assured… It seemed he had been waiting for a situation like this for decades.” The Newsletter quoted him as saying: “This is the season for reading books, not burning them. Let’s avoid pre-labelling. Let’s discard demagogy. Don’t elevate anyone to a ‘pedestal.’ Read and explore all perspectives.”

The reaction from the CP Historians Group environment was revealing. John Saville, a leading member of the Historians Group and a close associate of E.P. Thompson, advocated for an essentially nationalist response to the crisis. He argued it was essential to “stop talking hot air and develop a body of Marxist ideas that genuinely resonate with the British working class. This required studying our own workers’ movement and its history, about which there was far too little knowledge.” The SLL’s Newsletter responded sharply: “the real issue facing the socialist movement in 1957 was not a lack of knowledge about events in Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, but what had occurred within the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”

This exchange highlights the core political divide. The CP Historians Group tradition—represented by Saville’s ideas and, in different contexts, in Thompson’s *New Reasoner* and eventually the *New Left Review*—aimed to address the crisis of Stalinism by focusing on specifically British working-class traditions. This approach intentionally disconnected contemporary socialist politics from the broader revolutionary heritage of Bolshevism and the Left Opposition. E.P. Thompson, who collaborated with Saville in the *New Reasoner*, went further, writing in the *Newsletter* that “positions and attitudes which are labelled ‘Trotskyist’ tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” As North notes, he remained “a bitter opponent of Trotskyism.”

Hobsbawm’s Position at the Crossroads

Where did Hobsbawm position himself in this context? Unlike Thompson, Hill, and Saville, Hobsbawm did not resign from the Communist Party after the Hungarian repression. He remained—not due to naïve loyalty to socialist ideals, but because, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of his autobiography highlights, he held a deep, considered political belief in the Stalinist structure as a social-order tool rather than an agent of revolution. His admission—that he had “the instincts of a Tory communist “and his joy at Militant’s later expulsion from the Labour Party are not anomalies but consistent signs of a coherent political identity formed during the Popular Front era and never relinquished.

This means that Hobsbawm occupied a position even further removed from the SLL than the Thompson-Saville milieu. While Thompson and the New Left at least formally broke with the CPGB and attempted to construct a “humanist” Marxism outside it, however inadequate and anti-Trotskyist that project remained, Hobsbawm remained openly inside the party. His political function, as both Talbot and North demonstrate, was to provide the Stalinist apparatus with a scholarly and prestigious intellectual face precisely at the moment when it was most vulnerable to the challenge from the Trotskyist left.

The SLL’s Labour Review identified this tendency with precision. The relaunched journal described what kind of Marxist movement it intended to build: “Not a coterie of well-meaning university Dons and writers who have something to say on every subject except the class struggle taking place under their noses; not a party paying lip-service to Marxism but in fact dominated by whichever faction happens to be in control in Moscow.” This formulation — the “university Dons and writers” who could say everything except what mattered about the class struggle is a direct political characterization of the Historians Group milieu, including Hobsbawm.

Cliff Slaughter, himself a former CP member who had joined the Trotskyist movement precisely through the Wortley Hall confrontation, became the SLL’s primary theoretical voice in this polemic. His essay “The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class,” published in Labour Review, identified the core problem of the emerging New Left with clarity: their “effort to direct Marxism away from its concentration on the class struggle as the driving force of history.” He wrote: “It is around the concept of class that the drift from Marxism is concentrated, despite the lip-service paid to Marxism. There is not a scrap of Marxism in any approach to class which does not have class conflict at its core.”

This was a direct theoretical challenge to the historiographical tradition of which Hobsbawm was the most prominent representative. E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class — which would appear in 1963 — was already being gestured at in the New Reasoner discussions: the idea that working-class consciousness was formed primarily through cultural and national experience, through the “peculiarities of the English,” rather than through the international dynamics of the class struggle. Slaughter recognised this for what it was: not an enrichment of Marxism but its dissolution into a form of left nationalism, leaving the working class politically disarmed.

The second most important critique of the politics of Hobsbawm came from David North’s landmark essay “Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm” North begins his reply saying, “In the course of his long professional career as a historian, he has written many valuable scholarly works. The volumes he devoted to the French Revolution and the development of capitalism in the nineteenth century were thoughtful and sensitive studies.” Hobsbawm’s great “Age of…” tetralogy — The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994)  brought a genuinely sweeping Marxist-influenced analysis of modern world history to a mass readership. His work on banditry, pre-industrial popular protest, the invention of tradition, and nationalism contained real scholarly insights. For whole generations of students, his books provided an entry point into serious historical thinking about capitalism, class, and social transformation.”

These accomplishments merit recognition. However, as North’s direct response to Hobsbawm clarifies, they cannot be separated from or used to justify the deep and ultimately politically harmful distortions of his ideas and public role. Hobsbawm himself admitted that, as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he intentionally avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the twentieth century because “the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful.” As David North directly states in his reply: “Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have forced him to tell lies is a question he has never convincingly answered.”

This confession is more damning than any external criticism. It is Hobsbawm who wrote brilliantly about the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, the formation of the labour movement, and the age of capital, and who then, when it came to the central historical questions of his own lifetime, imposed a Stalinist political censorship on his own mind. The same pattern identified by Ann Talbot in the Group as a whole, the “Jesuitical partition” of the intellect, the pursuit of historical science up to the precise point where the bureaucracy drew its line, is openly acknowledged by its most eminent member.

What this means concretely is that in a historian who lived through the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the collapse of the USSR, the most important half of the historical record was either falsified or suppressed in the service of Stalinist politics. And when Hobsbawm finally did write about the twentieth century at length, in The Age of Extremes and in his essay collection On History, the result was precisely what David North’s reply demolishes in forensic detail.

North identifies this as a form of “ultra-deterministic, super-objectivist and fatalistic” historical method that is entirely alien to genuine Marxism. The exposure is incisive. Hobsbawm’s argument runs as follows: the Russian Revolution was, like a natural catastrophe, essentially “uncontrollable”; Lenin’s aims and intentions were “irrelevant” to what the revolution ultimately became; the USSR’s future course was “more or less prescribed” by 1921; and therefore “the rest is speculation.” The Left Opposition, Trotsky’s analysis, the political struggle within the Communist Party during the 1920s — all of this can be set aside. In a 300-page book centrally concerned with the place of the October Revolution in twentieth-century history, Trotsky’s name appears precisely once.

North’s reply is devastating on the methodological point. He writes that Hobsbawm’s position amounts to “starting, and ending, with ‘who won.'” But as North explains, historical materialism does not reduce history to a record of accomplished facts. It examines the contradictory and conflicting elements within the historical process — including the alternatives that were defeated. The struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist bureaucracy “happened.” The murder of thousands of genuine Bolsheviks in the Moscow Trials “happened.” Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers’ state “happened.” To exclude these from the historical record because, since Stalin won, there was no point in examining the defeated alternatives is not historical realism — it is apologetics.

The political implication is explicit: if the Stalinist dictatorship was the only plausible outcome of October 1917, then the entire Bolshevik seizure of power becomes historically indefensible. Hobsbawm, North argues, provides “not only an apology for Stalin — ‘objective conditions made him do it’ — but also vindicates the classical liberal bourgeois democratic argument against revolution as an instrument of social change.” By stripping revolutionary parties of any meaningful historical agency, by reducing them to passive vehicles of “uncontrollable” objective forces, Hobsbawm arrives at a historical philosophy that, whatever its intended register, tells the working class: do not attempt to consciously transform society, because history will do with your revolution what it will, and the outcome may be monstrous. This is not Marxism. It is its negation dressed in Marxist language.

Thompson’s Anti-Theoretical Turn

E.P. Thompson presents a different but related problem. Kaye is perceptive about the extraordinary qualities of The Making of the English Working Class — its recovery of artisan radicalism, its insistence on workers as self-making historical agents, its humanist challenge to a certain kind of structuralist Marxism. But Thompson’s later trajectory — culminating in The Poverty of Theory (1978), his polemic against Althusserian structuralism — represents not a deepening of Marxism but a retreat from it. Thompson’s rejection of theory, his empiricist elevation of “historical experience” as the final arbiter against theoretical “models,” was politically connected to his rejection of the revolutionary party and of the ICFI’s insistence on theoretical and political continuity. The attack on Althusser was conducted, whatever Thompson’s intentions, in terms that could equally be used against any systematic Marxist theory, including Trotsky’s. Kaye generally agrees with Thompson’s anti-Althusserian stance and discusses the controversy mainly from Thompson’s perspective. However, the ICFI contends that Thompson’s empiricism—his focus on specific English historical experiences rather than “continental” theoretical ideas—mirrored the nationalist bias evident in post-1956 New Left culture. The “English revolutionary tradition” that Thompson sought to defend ultimately aligned with the British national-state framework rather than a global socialist-revolutionary outlook.

Raphael Samuel and Populism

Raphael Samuel was a somewhat younger figure in this milieu, a student Communist and one of the most energetic organisers of History Workshop, which grew out of the Ruskin College adult education tradition in the 1960s. Samuel became the driving force behind History Workshop Journal (founded in 1976), which sought to democratise historical inquiry, recover the histories of ordinary workers, women, and people with low incomes, and challenge the elitism of academic historiography. His posthumous Theatres of Memory (1994–1998) is his most ambitious intellectual legacy.

Kaye’s account largely ends before Samuel’s most characteristic later work, but the trajectory is instructive. As we discussed previously, Samuel moved from the serious history-from-below of his early research toward an increasingly postmodern celebration of “popular memory,” “theatres of memory,” and the democratic plurality of historical consciousness. Theatres of Memory (1994) represents a Samuel who has essentially dissolved the Marxist analytical framework into a cultural-democratic pluralism that could coexist — as it in fact did — with a sympathetic account of British heritage culture. The class analysis that gave History Workshop Journal its initial power became increasingly optional, then marginal, then absent.

This trajectory from Marxist historiography through cultural studies to postmodern pluralism reflects a deliberate shift tied to a specific political movement. After breaking away from Stalinism in 1956 without adopting Trotskyism, this movement lacked a clear theory of the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategy. Without these core ideas, the focus on history-from-below naturally evolved into a popular academic trend—populism—that valorised ordinary people’s experiences while leaving the exploitative capitalist system unchallenged in analysis.

Raphael Samuel warrants special attention because his career exemplifies both the authentic energies and the significant political boundaries of the CPHG environment. His initial focus on recovering the history of artisans and the working class — including coal miners from Headington Quarry, navvies, and workshop artisans — represented earnest history from below. Additionally, his vigorous efforts to establish the History Workshop as a truly participatory organisation were impressive.

Samuel gradually shifted from Marxist political economy to celebrating popular culture, memory, and “unofficial knowledge,” ultimately merging class analysis into a form of general populism. ‘Theatres of Memory,’ which focuses on heritage, nostalgia, and the use of the past in modern British culture, exemplifies this development at its most advanced and problematic stage. While the analysis of popular memory and heritage is engaging, it lacks a theoretical framework for the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategies. This approach aligns more with cultural studies than Marxism. Additionally, Samuel’s later work shows a nostalgic attempt to rehabilitate his own Communist past—not by embracing Trotskyism or confronting Stalinism, but by recalling a sense of working-class culture and solidarity.

Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism

The debate over the shift from feudalism to capitalism, centred on Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) and Paul Sweezy’s critical reply in Science & Society  (1950), is among the most important theoretical disputes in twentieth-century Marxist history. It tackles the key questions of how and why capitalism arose — issues that are not just historical but essential for understanding social change, class struggle, and the essence of capitalism. To analyse this thoroughly, one must place it within the larger political and intellectual framework from which it originated.

Maurice Dobb (1900–1976), a Cambridge economist and longtime Communist Party member, was a key figure in shaping the CP Historians Group’s theoretical foundations, alongside Dona Torr. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was an ambitious effort to trace, from a Marxist perspective, the extensive historical process by which European feudalism gave way to capitalism. While it remains a significant work despite some flaws, it demonstrates a serious engagement with Marx’s political economy and the specific social changes involved.

Dobb argued that capitalism primarily arose from the internal contradictions and class conflicts within feudalism, rather than from trade expansion and merchant capitalism as earlier theories proposed. He highlighted that the key cause was the crisis of feudal production relations. Under feudalism, surplus extraction from peasants depended on economic coercion—lords wielded their monopoly on violence and legal authority to impose rent, services, and dues. This system was inefficient and prone to crises as lords increased exploitation to maintain revenue amid demographic and economic challenges, and peasant resistance grew, eventually rendering the system unsustainable. The decline of serfdom, especially in Western Europe, then opened the path for a new mode of production based on wage labour.

According to Dobb, the key social change was the rise of a class of petty commodity producers—including artisans, yeomen farmers, and small manufacturers—who broke free from feudal dependence and eventually formed the foundation of a capitalist class. Capitalism emerged from within the feudal economy, gradually evolving as small producers expanded and combined to become wage-earner employers. This explanation is primarily endogenous, meaning capitalism developed from the internal dynamics of feudal class relations rather than from external influences such as trade or commerce.

Sweezy’s Challenge: The Role of Trade and Merchant Capital

Paul Sweezy’s 1950 response in Science & Society, subsequently collected in the symposium volume The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1954) alongside replies by Dobb and contributions from Rodney Hilton, Kohachiro Takahashi, Christopher Hill, and others, mounted a challenge that exposed real tensions within Dobb’s framework while ultimately pointing in a less satisfactory theoretical direction.

Sweezy contended that Dobb’s endogenous explanation underestimated the extent to which external influences shaped the decline of feudalism. He referenced Henri Pirenne’s argument that the resurgence of long-distance trade from the eleventh century was key in dissolving feudal ties. The rise of a monetary economy, the increase of towns as commercial hubs outside the feudal structure, and the growth of merchant capital all created external pressures that unsettled the feudal order — pulling peasants and lords into market dynamics that gradually weakened serfdom and personal dependence.

According to Sweezy, the period between the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism featured a unique “pre-capitalist commodity production” phase. This stage was neither fully feudal nor entirely capitalist, but dominated by merchant capital and characterised by market-oriented production without widespread wage labour. He viewed this as a vital transitional period that Dobb’s model had overlooked.

The key point is this: if you trace the origins of capitalism mainly to the growth of trade and merchant capital, you inadvertently shift your focus from labour exploitation in production to circulation and exchange. As Beams demonstrates through his examination of Marx’s critique of Proudhon, Marx clearly argued that modern monopoly and competition emerge from the fundamental forces of capitalist production, rather than from an inherent market logic.

Merchant capital penetrating a feudal economy can weaken and destabilise existing relationships without necessarily leading to capitalism. As Marx explained in *Capital*, “The commercial capital, when it holds a dominant position, is everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production.” It may act as a force for exploitation without creating the distinct social relations of capitalism, such as widespread wage labour and the constant pressure to innovate in production methods.

The Wider Debate: Hilton, Takahashi, Hill, and the Brenner Thesis

The Science & Society discussion expanded into a wider international debate, with several members of the CP Historians Group participating. Rodney Hilton, the group’s expert in medieval history, strongly endorsed Dobb’s focus on internal class struggle and peasant resistance as the main forces behind the decline of feudalism. His later research on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and medieval English agrarian society provided detailed historical support for the idea that feudal contradictions arose internally. Hilton emphasised that peasant efforts, such as reducing rents and services, expanding common rights, and gaining personal freedom, were crucial to this process. Serfdom was a decisive historical force in its own right, not a mere symptom of larger structural processes.

Kohachiro Takahashi’s contribution added a comparative perspective, suggesting that Japan’s experience—where merchant capital integrated into a feudal society yet yielded outcomes distinct from those of Western European capitalism—supported Dobb’s argument that the nature of agrarian class relations, rather than trade alone, was the key factor. This comparative approach laid the groundwork for a significant later development in the discussion: Robert Brenner’s research in the 1970s.

Brenner’s intervention, known as the “Brenner Debate,” was sparked by his 1976 article in Past and Present and served both as a development and critique of the Dobb framework. Brenner argued, counter to Sweezy-influenced “commercialisation” explanations and demographic determinist views like those of Michael Postan, that the primary factors influencing different historical trajectories—such as capitalism in England, refeudalisation in Eastern Europe, and ongoing peasant proprietorship in France—were not trade expansion or demographic pressures.

Instead, he focused on the specific nature of agrarian class relations: land ownership, the power dynamics between lords and peasants, and the types of surplus extraction these relations enabled. England’s unique path to agrarian capitalism was shaped by landlord control of land, tenant vulnerability to market forces, and the development of large, consolidated farms using wage labour, the outcomes of medieval class struggles.

Brenner’s work sharpened and extended Dobb’s internalist emphasis while also revealing the implicit political tensions. His insistence on the specificity of class relations countered any mechanistic or teleological reading of the transition — any suggestion that capitalism was simply the “natural” outcome of expanded trade or demographic recovery. But it also raised uncomfortable questions for the CP Historians Group tradition: if capitalism’s origins were so deeply rooted in specific and contingent agrarian class relations, what became of the seamless progressive national narrative — from Peasants’ Revolt to Levellers to Chartism that underpinned the “people’s history” framework?

Any honest evaluation of this debate must consider the political environment in which Dobb operated. Like others in the Group, Dobb was politically shaped by the Communist Party and the Stalinist apparatus. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was published in 1946 — the same year the Cold War began to solidify, and the Popular Front alliance during the war was breaking down into open inter-imperialist rivalry. Ann Talbot’s analysis for WSWS of the CP Historians Group highlights the core distortion that Stalinist politics introduced into their historiography: the substitution of an internationalist class analysis with a nationalist “people’s history” approach, and the masking of the class nature of historical struggles behind a persistent national revolutionary narrative.

Dobb’s work faces criticism, though more subtly than Morton’s explicitly nationalist people’s History. His focus on the small producer, the yeoman farmer, the craftsman, and the emerging petty bourgeoisie implies a political stance: it sees the progressive social force not in the revolutionary workforce but in a “middle” layer between the feudal aristocracy and the rising proletariat. This aligns with Popular Front policies, which aimed to forge cross-class alliances around a “progressive” petty bourgeoisie against the “reactionary” landlord class, instead of promoting working-class independence from both.

Rodney Hilton: The Group’s Medieval Specialist

Rodney Hilton (1916–2002) was the leading expert in medieval English history within the Communist Party Historians Group. His work consistently reflected the group’s strong methodological principles while also highlighting the political limitations faced by its members. At the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1946 until retirement, his research focused on medieval agrarian society, peasant movements, and the evolving feudal class struggles—primarily in England.

Hilton’s key publications include A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (1966), Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973), The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975), and Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (1985). Throughout his work, Hilton maintained a consistent focus: showing that medieval peasants were not merely passive victims of feudal oppression but active agents in history, whose resistance, organisation, and quest for freedom were central to dismantling the feudal system from within.

The Peasants and the Class Struggle

Hilton’s main contribution was to challenge traditional medieval historiography by emphasising that class struggle is key to understanding medieval society. His analysis of the 1381 English Rising—the Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler and John Ball—showed that medieval peasants possessed a sophisticated political awareness, clear demands, and the ability to act collectively. Ball’s well-known statement — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” — reflected Hilton’s view of a genuinely egalitarian ideology rooted in the material realities of feudal exploitation, rather than merely religious or millenarian ideas.

Hilton and the Transition Debate

Hilton’s contribution to the Dobb-Sweezy debate, through his essay in the Science & Society symposium and his later work, strongly aligned with Dobb’s focus on class struggle as the key factor in overcoming feudalism. While Sweezy emphasised the external influence of merchant capital and trade, Hilton argued that the internal dynamics of the feudal relationship between lords and peasants—such as disputes over rents, labour obligations, and villeinage conditions—were crucial to explaining the collapse of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

This was more than a methodological choice; it was a solid historical argument. Hilton’s in-depth understanding of the English medieval countryside demonstrated, through empirical evidence, that the decline of feudalism in the 14th and 15th centuries was directly linked to increasing peasant resistance, their capacity to leverage demographic crises to better their conditions, and ultimately the end of serfdom. This was driven not by a broad expansion of trade but by the particular balance of class forces within the English countryside.

Simultaneously, the same limitation we discussed earlier regarding Dobb applies here: Hilton’s analysis mainly focused on the English context, specifically the dynamics of the English manor and village community. The broader international framework — linking English agrarian change to the wider European and global context of primitive accumulation, colonial exploitation, and the Atlantic slave trade — was never fully incorporated into his work. This reflects a common limitation of the entire Group: their adherence to a national perspective, shaped by the Popular Front politics that Dona Torr and Maurice Dobb had passed on to the next generation, which even limited their most thorough scholarship.

1956 and Hilton’s Response

Unlike Thompson and Hill, Hilton remained in the Communist Party after 1956. This is a significant biographical fact. His response to the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s secret speech was to stay, which, in this crucial respect, placed him closer to Hobsbawm than to Thompson. He did not experience 1956 as a decisive political rupture requiring a reconsideration of the fundamental framework. This is consistent with the character of his historical work: Hilton was among the Group’s most consistently “orthodox” members in his political affiliations, less inclined towards the cultural and humanist departures that characterised Thompson’s trajectory, and thus less subject to the kind of crisis of conscience that forced some of the Group’s intellectuals to confront their relationship to Stalinism more directly.

This is a significant biographical detail. The historian who remained in the party after the Hungarian workers’ uprising was suppressed made a political decision, perhaps not fully conscious or articulated, but real, that maintaining organisational continuity with the Stalinist system takes precedence over the political clarity that honest engagement with those events would demand. In Hilton’s case, this decision did not lead to obvious distortions in his medieval scholarship, which was removed from the immediate political debates of 1956. However, it implied that the political context in which he worked — and which influenced the “people’s history” tradition he helped develop — was never subjected to the critical examination required by a true break from Stalinism.

Kaye’s conclusion highlights the importance of the Group’s legacy—such as “history from below,’ recovering class formation, and emphasising the working class as a historical agent—which remain vital for revitalising the socialist left. He views their work as a tool to counteract both postmodernist doubts about historical agency and Thatcherite claims of ‘the end of socialism.” There is real value in defending historical materialism against postmodern ideas that dissolve class analysis. The same fundamental limitation as the tradition he champions: it. The text is situated within a social-democratic and Popular Front political context. The group’s focus on “history from below” is not aimed at creating an independent revolutionary party for the working class. Instead, it serves as cultural and intellectual backing for left-wing activities within bourgeois democratic institutions — primarily, the Democratic Party in the American setting where Kaye operates. The radical democratic tradition, drawn from Thompson, Hill, and others, is used by Kaye to justify progressive-patriotic politics, similar to Sanders’ approach of “reclaiming the American tradition.” The ICFI sees this as a means of subordinating workers to the ruling class.

The Communist Party Historians Group produced genuine intellectual achievements against the dominant tide of conservative and liberal academic historiography. Their insistence on class, on revolution, on the agency of ordinary people was real and valuable. But their political formation within Stalinism imposed an indelible nationalist distortion on their work, prevented serious engagement with the history of the Fourth International and the fight against the Moscow Trials, and ultimately left them without the theoretical and political resources to develop beyond populism and culturalism when the Stalinist framework itself collapsed.

Kaye’s British Marxist Historians is a valuable survey and remains a useful starting point for anyone studying this tradition. But it cannot provide what a genuinely Marxist assessment requires: an evaluation of the CPHG tradition against the standard of the political continuity of Marxism, not merely its intellectual achievements. That standard is provided by the Fourth International and its history by the fight of the Left Opposition against Stalinist falsification, by the defence of the October Revolution against both Stalinist bureaucratism and bourgeois reaction, and by the sustained theoretical work of the ICFI.

Notes

“These are the times … this is the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party-Eric Hobsbawm-www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-historians-group-of-the-communist-party.

The New Left Must Look to the Working Class Gerry Healy Labour Review Oct- Nov 1959

An Unreasonable Reasoner Editorial Labour Review Vol 3 No 2 March April 1958

Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the 20th Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm, by David North, 3 January 1998. 

A People’s History of London by John Rees and Lyndsey German is a revised, updated edition of their 2012 book. It broadens the narrative to cover the 21st century, examining London’s social and economic crises. The book explores key issues such as the Grenfell Tower fire and its systemic implications, the rise of mass popular mobilisation, such as the Palestine solidarity movement, and the ongoing housing crisis, which highlights struggles against aggressive urban developers and corporate landlords.

John Rees is a recognised author, broadcaster, and political advocate. He is part of the editorial team at Counterfire and was a co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition. Lindsey German, a lifelong resident of London, is a socialist writer and activist. She serves as the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and has previously run for Mayor of London.

John Rees and Lindsey German are key figures in Counterfire, a British pseudo-left group that split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 2010. Both have played significant roles in organising the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). They maintain that the coalition isn’t about establishing an authentic anti-war movement but aims to steer anti-war sentiment towards support for the Labour Party and trade union leadership. The STWC “functioned as a mechanism for capturing anti-war sentiment and bringing it under the political tutelage of the trade union bureaucracy and a handful of Labourites.” This is the political environment influencing Rees and German’s historical work, shaping it in fundamental ways.

What the Book Does

A People’s History of London explores centuries of the city’s radical and working-class history, including the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the Chartists, the Matchgirls’ Strike, and the Suffragettes. It is written in an accessible style and seeks to recover a tradition of popular resistance. In this way, it offers a valuable introduction to events often overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream bourgeois history.

However, the book’s framework mirrors the political constraints and deceptions of its authors. Several key points need to be addressed. The “People’s History” genre has a problematic history. This tradition, exemplified by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, tends to oversimplify class differences among the oppressed, replace materialist analysis with moral outrage, and celebrate struggle as an end in itself. It fails to ask the crucial question: what program and party are necessary to guide the working class to victory? The history of London’s radical movements is essentially a record of betrayed class struggles, and understanding the reasons for these betrayals requires political analysis, not mere romanticisation.

A major critique of Rees and German concerns their failure to confront reformism and the Labour Party honestly. Their political view is strongly aligned with the Labour left, including Corbynism and the STWC’s focus on figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn. This shows they are unable to grasp key lessons from London’s labour history: that the Labour Party was meant to contain the working class within capitalism, that trade union bureaucracies have often suppressed class struggle, and that London workers’ setbacks are mainly due to these betrayals.

The origins of the “People’s History” genre are rooted in a specific political context, rather than emerging from a vacuum. As Ann Talbot’s key essay on Christopher Hill underscores, the influential first book in Britain was A.L. Morton’s A People’s History of England, created by the Communist Party Historians’ Group, which included Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rodney Hilton.

Talbot highlights the political core of this: “People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of the Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie.” Essentially, the genre was developed to support Stalinist politics, overlaying class distinctions with a nationalist “people” narrative to justify class collaboration, rather than promoting independent working-class politics.

This is not merely background; it forms the core genetic code of the genre, shaping all works that carry the “People’s History” label, including Howard Zinn’s influential *A People’s History of the United States* and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.

Tom Mackaman’s insightful obituary of Howard Zinn, a leading figure in the genre, offers a sharp critique of its limitations. Mackaman references Engels’ view on what he called “old materialist” philosophy: it “could not answer the question of what historical forces drive the motives of individuals and groups in history.” Engels argued that “its conception of history, insofar as it exists at all, is mainly pragmatic; it categorises people in history as noble or ignoble and generally shows that the noble are often defrauded while the ignoble tend to prevail.”

This accurately describes the “People’s History” approach, which is fundamentally moral: the oppressed versus their oppressors, resisters against the controllers, and the people versus the Establishment. While names and dates may vary, the core narrative remains unchanged. It lacks dialectical contradictions, fails to recognise historically progressive class forces, and omits analysis of how material relations of production propel social change through conflict. Instead, it depicts an endless cycle of oppression and resistance without proposing a strategy to resolve or end either.

Mackaman highlights how Zinn’s approach leads to significant historiographical errors. Because Zinn views history through a strict moral binary of villains and victims, he interprets the American Revolution and the Civil War as two of the most objectively progressive events in global history—as essentially elite conspiracies aimed at controlling popular unrest. Abraham Lincoln is reduced to a mere “shrewd political operative,” and Tom Paine is criticised for his association with a wealthy individual. These misrepresentations are based not on evidence but on the moralising framework characteristic of the genre.

Mackaman highlights a critical point: the “People’s History” genre originated from the revisionist academic work of the 1960s and 70s, which coincided with the rise of identity politics on American campuses. This alignment is deliberate. Mackaman notes: “The new studies emerged alongside the development of identity politics and the push for affirmative action on campuses, as US liberalism, trade unions, and the Democratic Party aimed to find a new base for their policies outside the working class.” This genre supported this political agenda by replacing the working class—considered the revolutionary agent of history—with a diverse array of oppressed groups whose resistance could be celebrated without questioning the need to overthrow capitalism revolutionarily.

E.P. Thompson, alongside A.L. Morton and Howard Zinn, is a key figure in the genre of A People’s History. This genre and Thompson’s role in it cannot be separated from his

political roots in the Communist Party Historians Group of postwar Britain. Thompson, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and others, was educated within a tradition influenced by Stalinist politics—particularly the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s and 40s.

As Ann Talbot argued in her appraisal of Christopher Hill, this school of history was not simply a scholarly tendency: “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.”

In other words, “people’s history” reflected the historiographical view of Popular Front politics, portraying the working class as subordinate to supposedly progressive bourgeois factions, cloaked in the rhetoric of a unified “national people” fighting oppression. The class struggle was transformed into an inspiring moral narrative, but one that is politically benign: a legacy of “resistance” that avoids advocating for revolution, challenging the need to overthrow the bourgeois state, or calling for revolutionary leadership.

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is truly a landmark in scholarship. Its goal — to uncover the agency, culture, and deliberate self-formation of the English working class during the late 18th and early 19th centuries — led to outstanding empirical research. Thompson emphasized that the working class was not merely shaped by industrial conditions but actively shaped itself, challenging simple economic determinism. His exploration of artisan radicalism, Methodist dissent, Luddism, and the radical clubs of the 1790s deepened our understanding of how class consciousness emerges.

But the political framework within which Thompson worked imposed severe limitations. Like Hill, Thompson was drawn to identifying a distinctively English revolutionary tradition — one running from the Civil War to the emerging labour movement that was fundamentally national in character. Talbot observes that both Hill and Thompson “had no interest in showing the continental origins of many of the ideas that inspired the English revolution,” nor in tracing the genuinely international development of Enlightenment thought, democratic theory, and working-class politics.

A true Marxist approach to history involves analysing the leadership and goals of working-class movements, whether in London, the US, or elsewhere. Unlike the “People’s History” genre, it must examine the class dynamics driving both victories and defeats, place national struggles in the context of global class conflict and draw lessons for today’s socialist movement. It views the working class not just as victims to be pitied but as the revolutionary force whose consciousness evolves through struggle, and whose liberation depends on building an international revolutionary party.

The political role of the genre today. From a Marxist perspective, the main limitation of this genre is its strategic emptiness. While it can depict struggles, it cannot analyse their failures. It can praise resisters but cannot determine what program or party would have led them to victory. It can list the crimes of the ruling class, yet it cannot explain how these crimes are perpetuated, specifically through the capitalist mode of production and the state structures that sustain it.

Today, the “People’s History” brand mainly serves as a marketing term for pseudo-left ideology. When John Rees and Lindsey German author a “People’s History of London,” they exploit the emotional appeal of centuries of working-class resistance yet deliberately sidestep the political conclusions such history implies. This genre permits them to praise the Chartists, match girls, and dockers without addressing why these movements were ultimately defeated. It also avoids recognizing the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy as the primary agents of class betrayal in the twentieth century or advocating for a revolutionary party with a socialist agenda.

Notes

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1982),

[F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow, 1973),

H.N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution, published posthumously in 1961 and edited by Christopher Hill, stands as one of the most significant radical narratives of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution. It is valuable not only for what it uncovers about one of history’s major revolutionary upheavals, but also for the insights into its political and theoretical boundaries, which shed light on the tradition it originates from.

Henry Noel Brailsford was among the most talented socialist journalists and writers in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. He was linked to the Independent Labour Party, a strand of ethical, Nonconformist socialism that positioned itself to the left of the Labour Party’s main faction but remained politically allied with it. Brailsford wrote extensively on topics like foreign affairs, imperialism, and international politics. His major work on the seventeenth century, The Levellers and the English Revolution, was left incomplete upon his death and was published posthumously in 1961, edited by Christopher Hill.

Brailsford engaged with the Levellers with sincere empathy and thorough scholarship. He restored the coherence and importance of their political agenda, the Agreements of the People, which calls for manhood suffrage, the abolition of tithes and excise, religious toleration, and legal equality, and positioned them as the most advanced democratic movement produced by the English Revolution. His respectful treatment of figures such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn as serious political thinkers, rather than merely eccentric sectarians, marked a significant contribution. Brailsford demonstrated that the Levellers were not just agitators but were working to establish a constitutional basis for a democratic republic, an effort with few global precedents at the time.

Hill edited Brailsford’s posthumous volume on the Levellers, creating an apt collaboration as his research complemented and expanded Brailsford’s focus on the radical plebeians of the revolution. A prominent figure in 20th-century Marxist historiography of the English Revolution, Hill’s work was thoroughly reviewed by Ann Talbot of the WSWS, who emphasised its complexities following Hill’s death in 2003. His ideas were influenced by the Marxist Historians Group of the Communist Party, which included renowned scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm.

His main contribution was challenging the dominant Whig interpretation of British history, which presents a comforting myth symbolised by the Trevelyan family’s country houses, owned by the National Trust, and suggests that Britain experienced a uniquely peaceful and gradual political development without revolutionary upheaval. Hill contended that the events of the 1640s were a true bourgeois revolution, with one ruling class overthrowing another, driven by the mass population whose awareness was significantly changed. As Talbot points out, “these achievements were considerable at the time and remain relevant today, especially as historians increasingly dismiss any serious economic or social analysis.”

Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1972) examines, more deeply than Brailsford, the radical groups such as the Diggers, Ranters, and early Quakers—highlighting how these marginalised factions advanced social change that the propertied classes leading the revolution could never permit. However, Hill’s perspective was heavily influenced by the Stalinist politics in which he was educated. As Talbot points out, the Communist Party promoted a “People’s History” that maintained a primarily national outlook aligned with the Popular Front, thereby subordinating the working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. This resulted in a key limitation: Hill never placed the English Revolution within its broader international context, nor did he examine how the ideas of English revolutionaries connected to continental Enlightenment thought. He also retained a romantic attachment to specifically English radical traditions. His later interest in radical sects during the Restoration period, long after their revolutionary importance had faded, reflects this nationalism’s desire to portray a continuous English revolutionary tradition rather than explore how revolutionary ideas spread and evolved across national borders.

Hill notably avoided the twentieth century almost completely. As Talbot observes, among the Marxist Historians Group, Hill focused on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth, Hobsbawm on the nineteenth, and Hilton on the Middle Ages, none of whom specialised in their own era. This was intentional. In recent history, Stalinist politics exerted too direct a control; engaging honestly would have led to conflicts with the bureaucracy. Hill’s sole engagement with the twentieth century, a 1947 study of Lenin, is marked by repeated dismissals of Trotsky as a “Westernising theoretician”, a point Talbot rightly criticises as his weakest and most politically dishonest aspect. He could not fully pursue his true Marxist instincts where the bureaucratic line was drawn.

Trotsky’s 1925 work, ‘Where Is Britain Going?’, surprisingly predicted many of Hill’s key insights about the English Revolution. It emphasised two major revolutionary traditions in British history, the revolution of Cromwell and Chartism, which Whig gradualism tends to overlook. Trotsky saw Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader who suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to go beyond the limits of capitalist property.

Whether Hill independently drew these conclusions from Marx and Engels or was subtly influenced by Trotsky without acknowledgement, his most important historical work aligns with them. The tragedy is that his political background prevented him from realising that the essential lessons of the English Revolution, namely, that the bourgeoisie betrays democratic goals whenever property is at risk and that only the working class can finish the democratic tasks left incomplete by the bourgeois revolution, are highly relevant to the twentieth-century challenges faced by Hill and his generation.

Hill and Brailsford

Although they came from different political backgrounds, both aimed to rekindle the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, challenging a conservative and complacent mainstream history. Brailsford was driven by an ethical socialist’s moral commitment to the oppressed, while Hill applied the Marxist analysis of class structures. Collectively, their work exemplifies the pinnacle of the British left-wing historical tradition focused on this era.

Their shared limitations are also instructive. Both remained confined within a nationally bounded framework and did not fully explore the global implications of the English Revolution, such as its role in the Atlantic world, its links to the Dutch Republic, or the ideas that would later influence the American and French Revolutions a century afterwards. Moreover, for political rather than purely intellectual reasons, neither could apply the lessons of seventeenth-century revolutionary history to the revolutionary challenges of their own time. Trotskyism, however, broadens this horizon in a way neither the ILP nor the Stalinist tradition allowed.

The Levellers and the English Revolution

Brailsford’s book focuses on the Levellers, a radical democratic group that emerged from the New Model Army and London’s artisan and petty-bourgeois classes during the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers produced important documents, especially the Agreement of the People, which advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the abolition of monopolies and tithes. Their efforts broadened the scope of the English Revolution towards its most leftist and democratic ideals.

Brailsford’s account is a passionate and richly detailed narrative that takes these men and their ideas seriously as historical actors, not merely background colour to the drama of Cromwell and Parliament. In this sense, the book is a real contribution to understanding the social depth of the revolution. Brailsford’s socialism was rooted in the parliamentary, Fabian, and ethical-socialist traditions of British labourism. He never broke from the framework of reformism, the perspective that capitalism could be gradually transformed from within through parliamentary pressure, trade union organisation, and moral persuasion of the ruling class.

Trotsky’s analysis of the British labour movement, set out in Where Is Britain Going? (1925) was a direct critique of this entire tradition: Trotsky argued that the ILP and the labour bureaucracy were incapable of leading the working class to power precisely because they refused to make the political break with bourgeois institutions.

Brailsford’s approach is limited by the tradition he comes from. As an ethical socialist and ILP liberal, he admired the Levellers mainly for their constitutional and democratic demands, viewing them as early forerunners of liberal democracy rather than fully understanding the class dynamics behind their position. He focused on the moral strength of their arguments rather than on the social forces that enabled or hindered them. While he recognised that Cromwell and the Grandees suppressed the Levellers, he did not fully analyse why the bourgeois revolutionary leadership felt compelled to do so. This gap is not a personal shortcoming but a reflection of the ethical socialist tradition’s tendency to moralise history rather than examine its material basis.

John Rees and the English Revolution

John Rees is arguably the most influential and skilled historian to employ a Marxist historiographical approach to analyse the English bourgeois revolution. His work highlights the strengths of Hill and Brailsford but also points to their political shortcomings. Rees, a longtime member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and co-founder of Counterfire, authored key works such as “The Algebra of Revolution” (1998) and notably “The Leveller Revolution” (2016), which explores themes similar to Brailsford’s. He provides an earnest scholarly view of the English Revolution from a leftist perspective. Nonetheless, from a Marxist/Trotskyist standpoint, both Rees and Counterfire operate as a pseudo-left, projecting a radical front while subordinating working-class political independence to broad front tactics, such as Coalitions like Stop the War, which link workers with bourgeois-liberal and establishment forces. Rees has played a key role in this strategic orientation.

As a result, despite his competent historical scholarship, Rees’s political actions often undermine the very lessons of the English Revolution, such as the idea that the bourgeoisie betrays its revolution when the plebeian masses push beyond property boundaries, and that the working class needs its own independent political leadership. Brailsford deserves better than to be pressed into service as a respectable ancestor for Counterfire’s brand of left reformism. He was a serious socialist grappling with real questions. The tragedy is that the tradition he inhabited, sincere in its individual representatives, was organically incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership the working class required.

The Levellers and the struggle for Socialism Today

The Levellers’ experience offers deep lessons for today’s working class. The key lesson is that, regardless of how radical the democratic demands are during a revolutionary crisis, they cannot be achieved unless the working class or its equivalent seizes political power directly. While the Levellers controlled the army and had street support, they lacked a party and a clear program to challenge the bourgeoisie for state control as a unified class; they merely pressured it. Cromwell understood this dynamic, which allowed him to outmanoeuvre and ultimately dismantle them.

Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, summarised the main lesson from the entire bourgeois revolutionary period: the ideological forms through which class interests manifested such as Puritanism, natural rights theory, and millenarianism were merely the historical guise in which emerging class forces presented themselves The Levellers, by demanding “freeborn rights,” articulated the revolutionary democratic aspirations of the emerging plebeian classes in a language accessible to them.

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, went even further, explicitly communalistic in their demands, occupying common land and arguing that true freedom required the abolition of property itself. Brailsford’s book touches on this dimension, though Winstanley is not its central focus. From a Marxist standpoint, the Diggers represent the most historically prescient current of the English Revolution, expressing in embryonic and utopian form the communist impulse that would only find its scientific foundation two centuries later with Marx and Engels. In this respect, readers would do well to examine John Gurney’s work on the diggers and Winstanley.

‘The Levellers and the English Revolution’ is Brailsford’s most significant work historically, showcasing both his strengths and limitations. His strengths are notable: he vividly portrayed the Levellers as historical figures, reconstructed the Putney Debates with remarkable clarity, and took their radical democratic agenda seriously at a time when mainstream historiography overlooked them. On the other hand, his limitations are also evident: his framework was rooted in a liberal-democratic lineage, viewing the Levellers as precursors to parliamentary reform, rather than employing a rigorous Marxist analysis of the class forces that drove and limited the English bourgeois revolution.

The Levellers and the English Revolution is a crucial and accessible book about a highly intense yet often overlooked phase in the history of class struggle. Brailsford’s work should be read alongside Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going?, Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down* and God’s Englishman, as well as Engels’s analysis of bourgeois revolutions in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It shows that major revolutionary upheavals often produce unforeseen forces, and their success hinges on political leadership capable of completing the revolution. This remains a vital lesson for the working class in today’s revolutionary movements.

“…The tongue of man is a trumpet of warre, and sedition.” —

Thomas Hobbes De Cive, v. 5

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

John Locke

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity…Peace is their ruin,…by war they are enriched…Peace is their war, peace is their poverty”

―Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

The discerning reader will recognise that this website is named after Meiksins-Wood’s notable book, ‘A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688’ (1997), co-authored by Ellen Meiksins Wood and her husband Neal Wood. I received the book from my friend Tony Hyland, and its title seemed apt for a site created to share my interest in the English bourgeois revolution. Given that the website has been around for over eighteen years, a review of this book has long been overdue.

It is, without a doubt, an important work in the history of political thought. The book shows how modern political theory, from Thomas More to Hobbes and Locke, emerged as both a response to and an ideological expression of the rise of capitalism in England. Its central claim is that modern political philosophy was shaped not in an abstract world of ideas, but in the real social conflicts produced by agrarian capitalism, enclosure, and the dispossession of the peasantry.

The Woods carefully chose the title A Trumpet of Sedition because it evokes the radical political pamphlet culture of 17th-century England, the era of the Levellers, Diggers, and other popular movements that emerged during the English Civil War. This phrase, originating from the polemical language of that era, was used to describe writings that defied established authority. The Woods use it ironically and provocatively: their book explores how the political theory of that period could both justify the growing capitalist system (as in Hobbes and Locke) and oppose it (as in radical democratic movements later repressed).

Wood’s approach marks a genuine advance on idealist histories of political thought, which treat Hobbes or Locke as merely responding to ideas rather than to material social conditions. Her insistence that political theory must be understood in relation to the class struggles and property relations of its time is fundamentally Marxist in method, even if Wood herself worked within the framework of “Political Marxism” associated with Robert Brenner rather than the classical Trotskyist tradition. 

The Woods and the Historiographical Debate

Lawrence Stone once characterised writing about the English Revolution as navigating a ‘battleground heavily contested, filled with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by fierce scholars ready to fight every inch.” Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood entered a historiographical landscape already shaped by Christopher Hill, the influential Marxist historian of the period. As Ann Talbot’s obituary of Hill notes, his achievements were twofold: he identified the mid-17th-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution that replaced one class’s dominance with another, and he highlighted the vital role of the masses in revolutions, stressing that a change in consciousness among the people is essential for revolution. His works, The World Turned Upside Down, God’s Englishman, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution*, and Milton and the English Revolution presented a materialist view that influenced a whole generation’s understanding of the era.[1]

The Woods built upon this tradition but added a unique theoretical focus. Their framework, “Political Marxism,” linked to historian Robert Brenner, argues that capitalism began specifically with English agrarian property relations—particularly the competitive dynamic between landlords and tenant farmers that arose from the way feudalism broke down in England, unlike in France or other countries. As a result, the Woods emphasised the connection between property relations and political ideas.

Political Marxism shows significant shortcomings. Although Ellen Meiksins Wood was a thorough theorist of capitalism and its historical evolution, Political Marxism as a movement lacks a cohesive theory of revolutionary organisation, a clear strategy for capturing state power, and any link to the legacy of the Fourth International. It primarily developed and thrived in academic circles—through journals like New Left Review and Historical Materialism, whose social base is centred on left-wing intellectuals rather than the working class itself. This influences the questions it considers and, importantly, which questions it neglects. The crucial debates on revolutionary strategy—such as how workers can break free from trade union bureaucracies, the relationship between the working class and its leaders, and why the Russian Revolution failed are largely missing from Wood’s work.

In A Trumpet of Sedition, it is shown that the great political thinkers from Thomas More (in 1516) through Hobbes and Locke were not just tackling abstract philosophical issues but were also engaging, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, with the social upheavals caused by the rise of agrarian capitalism. The enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, and the commercialisation of agriculture were the material forces that led to the political crises of the 17th century and shaped the political ideas that sought to understand these changes.

Thomas More was another figure of profound ambiguity. His 1516 work, Utopia, is frequently regarded as the first depiction of a socialist community in English. However, Wood sees it not merely as a humanist fantasy but as a sharp critique of the dispossession driven by enclosure. More’s well-known remark about sheep “devouring men” criticises primitive accumulation, a process that Marx later analysed in Capital as the violent severance of peasants from the land. Nonetheless, More was also rooted in the old order, a supporter of the Church. His utopian ideas lacked revolutionary potential; he could imagine an alternative society, but was unable to connect that vision to any class capable of enacting it.

Wood portrays Hobbes as more than just a defender of monarchy. She argues that his responses to social upheaval stemming from capitalism’s rise and conflicts caused by agrarian change are central to understanding his support for a strong sovereign. This stance is seen as a reaction to class conflict and instability, not an abstract view of human nature. Wood challenges the common perspective among some liberal and postmodern scholars that Hobbes was merely a reactionary advocate of authoritarianism. Following Frederick Engels, she places Hobbes among the founders of modern materialism. In her view, Hobbes is positioned alongside Bacon and Locke in a philosophical tradition that, moving from England into the French Enlightenment, influenced the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution and the development of dialectical and historical materialism.

Thomas Hobbes receives the most philosophically rich treatment. As Ann Talbot’s article carefully establishes, “Hobbes played a vital role in the development of modern materialism and formed a link in a chain that passed from Britain to France that was, in turn, an organic part of the political developments that found expression in the French Revolution of 1789. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism would have been impossible without that earlier development. In his battle against the power of the Church, in his courageous stand for materialism at a time when the vagaries of fate favoured superstition, in his struggle to create a science of politics, and his insistence that no area of experience was not susceptible to scientific analysis, Hobbes was a man who transcended his times. But he was a man of his time and expressed the interests of his class and the experiences of the social layer to which he belonged.”[2]

According to the Woods, Hobbes’s political theory illustrates the transitional phase of early capitalism: the bourgeoisie still required a strong state to ensure the conditions for economic growth, but its authority needed to be based on rational consent rather than divine right. As Talbot points out, “His conception of the state was, in that sense, a modern one rather than a feudal one.” Importantly, Hobbes recognised Cromwell’s Commonwealth as a legitimate sovereign once it demonstrated the ability to maintain order. This stance rendered him ineffective as a royalist propagandist and aligned with his materialist philosophy.

James Harrington, author of *Oceana* (1656), which the Woods also examine, is the thinker most clearly linking property to political power. He argues that how land is distributed shapes the government. This “agrarian law’ idea is essentially a proto-materialist view of politics, reflecting the gentry class’s awareness that had gained victory in the Civil War. They sought a theoretical justification for their political control.

John Locke faces the fiercest ideological critique in this analysis. While mainstream liberal thought regards Locke’s *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) as a foundational theory of natural rights, individual freedom, and limited governance, The Woods challenge this view as a form of class mystification. Locke’s property theory — that labour combined with nature grants rightful ownership — is not a universal principle but a tool used by the agrarian capitalist class. It endorses enclosure and dispossession by framing private property as a natural right that precedes political society. For Locke, the “consent of the governed” actually means the consent of property owners; those without property lack a genuine political voice. According to Locke, liberty is the liberty of those who already possess property.

Levellers, Diggers, and the “Trumpet of Sedition”

The book’s title hints at the suppressed radical currents of the revolution within the bourgeois settlement. The Levellers, led by John Lilburne, advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the elimination of monopolies and tithes. Their 1647 Agreement of the People was a truly democratic constitutional proposal that challenged the limits of parliamentary gentry acceptance. Even more radical were the Diggers, or True Levellers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who believed that genuine freedom depended on the common ownership of land. Winstanley’s writings, blending religious language with radical social ideas, are among the most notable documents of 17th-century political thought.

In 1649, Cromwell defeated the Levellers, and local landowners dismantled the Diggers’ communes with government approval. The Restoration of 1660 further suppressed these movements. The 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution,’ which placed William of Orange on the throne and endorsed Locke’s political ideas as justification, marked the final strengthening of the bourgeois settlement: a palace revolution that safeguarded the propertied classes from both royal absolutism and radical popular movements.

This brings me nicely to the importance of Leon Trotsky’s intervention in the debate over the English bourgeois revolution. Trotsky, in his book Where Is Britain Going? (1925), pointed to “two revolutionary traditions in British history — that of Cromwell in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism. For Trotsky, leadership was decisive, and this is summed up in these words: ” Different classes in different conditions and for different tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and critical, periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority in such of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most sharply and fully. When we speak of dictatorship, we must, in the first place, be clear as to what interests of what particular classes find their historical expression through the dictatorship. For one era, Oliver Cromwell; for another, Robespierre, expressed the historically progressive tendencies in the development of bourgeois society. William Pitt, likewise extremely close to a personal dictatorship, defended the interests of the monarchy, the privileged classes and the top bourgeoisie against a revolution of the petty bourgeoisie that found its highest expression in the dictatorship of Robespierre. The liberal vulgarians customarily say that they are against a dictatorship from the left just as much as from the right. However, in practice, they do not let slip any opportunity to support a dictatorship of the right. But for us, the question is whether one dictatorship moves society forward while another drags it back. Mussolini’s dictatorship is a dictatorship of the prematurely decayed, impotent, thoroughly contaminated Italian bourgeoisie: it is a dictatorship with a broken nose. The ‘dictatorship of Lenin’ expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed with anyone, then it is not with Napoleon, nor even with Mussolini, but with Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be said, with some justice, that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.[3]

The Wood’s Contribution and their Limits

The Woods make a meaningful and enduring contribution in A Trumpet of Sedition. Their focus on interpreting political ideas through property relations and class struggle is inherently Marxist. Highlighting how Lockean liberalism functions as a class-based ideology rather than a universal philosophy is especially important, as is their revival of the revolution’s overlooked radical traditions.

However, the constraints of Political Marxism are also evident. Its tendency to limit capitalism’s origins to English agrarian conditions results in a somewhat narrow analytical scope. More critically, this reflects the academic left tradition that Woods figures in the book excels in historical sociology and intellectual history but remains largely silent on revolutionary strategy and the role of political parties. The Levellers’ defeat was due not merely to an insufficiently radical program but also to their lack of a clear theory of state power and an organisational structure capable of challenging it. Winstanley’s concept of communal ownership was more radical than Lilburne’s constitutionalism, yet neither offered a concrete strategy for seizing political power.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was created to address a key issue. In every bourgeois revolution, plebeian and working-class forces are mobilised but ultimately betrayed by the bourgeoisie, which fears social revolution more than the old regime. This lesson is both historical and strategic — the working class must struggle for political independence, led by its own party, aiming not for the completion of a bourgeois revolution but for socialist societal change. The Woods offer a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie in 17th-century England manipulated and later suppressed revolutionary masses. However, their framework lacks a political theory capable of preventing history from repeating itself.

A Trumpet of Sedition is a profound and essential work in materialist intellectual history, recommended for anyone exploring the ideological roots of capitalism. Wood’s approach—placing political ideas within their class context—is genuinely Marxist and offers insightful analyses of figures like More, Harrington, Hobbes, and Locke. Its shortcomings are not in its analysis but in what it omits: the shift from merely understanding the world to actively transforming it, along with the programmatic and organisational issues that the Trotskyist movement has always emphasised as integral to any serious socialist politics.

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[1] “These are the times … this is the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[2] The ghost of Thomas Hobbes-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/hobb-m12.html

[3] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution, not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to its victory, its own organisations stood as the chief obstacles.”

Leon Trotsky

“The past is another country. But doing history is, by definition, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Much of what was at stake in Spain remains in present-day dilemmas, at whose heart lie issues of race, religion, gender, and other forms of cultural war that challenge us not to resort to political or other types of violence. In short, as this book’s epigraph exhorts, we should not mythologise our fears and turn them into weapons against those who are different. The Spanish Civil War and all the other civil wars of Europe’s mid-20th century were configured in great part by this mythologising of fear, by a hatred of difference. The greatest challenge of the 21st century is, then, not to do this.”

Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War

“There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no bootlicking, no cap-touching.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Giles Tremlett is a competent writer, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. However, as a liberal journalist, Tremlett approaches the Spanish Civil War from a strongly liberal perspective, which is not just limited but also potentially misleading. This is because the key issues of the conflict are fundamentally political and class-related, topics that liberalism struggles to address honestly.

Tremlett, along with other liberal historians, has long dominated the historiography of the Spanish Revolution. Adam Hochschild referred to this dominant perspective as the “Authorised Version,” which depicts the conflict as a clear-cut battle between democracy and fascism. According to this view, the Republic was defeated by Franco’s stronger military, the non-intervention of Western democracies, and insufficient Soviet aid. Tremlett mainly works within this interpretive framework.

A Marxist approach to history challenges the liberal view of figures like Francisco Franco, emphasising that he cannot be understood without considering the revolutionary crisis he was tasked with suppressing. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was a pivotal event of the twentieth century, representing more than just a clash between democracy and fascism. It was essentially an unfinished workers’ revolution, whose defeat was orchestrated not only by Franco’s troops but also by the Popular Front and Stalinist institutions from within.

Franco initiated his military coup against the Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936. Within days, workers in cities like Barcelona and Madrid, as well as other locations, spontaneously resisted the coup by arming themselves and forming workers’ power committees. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. Franco’s win was not predetermined; it resulted from a political betrayal.

Francisco Franco’s 1939 victory was more political than military. It resulted from the strategic suppression of the Spanish Revolution by what was claimed to be its leftist defenders. To understand Franco, one must recognise the criminality of the pseudo-lefts of that time, mainly the POUM and the Stalinist apparatus it covered for. When the Spanish army launched its fascist coup in July 1936, the working class responded with remarkable spontaneity and strength. In Barcelona, Madrid, and other industrial centres, workers took up arms, formed militias, seized factories, and almost pushed the socialist revolution forward. Franco faced not only a defending republic but a proletariat actively revolting. The key question was whether the movement could find the necessary political leadership to achieve victory.

The influence of the modern-day pseudo-left groups covering for past and present Stalinist treachery persists today. Contemporary pseudo-left groups like the British Socialist Workers Party still endorse the Stalinist view of the Spanish Civil War. Their primary historian, Andy Durgan, wrote a book for students and teachers that systematically justified the Popular Front policies that led to Franco’s victory. Durgan employed a Stalinist approach: denying the existence of dual power in Spain in 1936, dismissing the socialist revolution as a real possibility, and portraying the Popular Front as a class-collaborationist alliance that suppressed the workers’ uprising, thereby presenting the workers’ uprising as the only legitimate and feasible form of government.[1]

As Ann Talbot, who reviewed Durgan’s book sharply, observes, “Durgan’s book reflects the rightward evolution of an entire layer of intellectuals who would at one time have associated themselves with left-wing politics and would even have identified themselves as revolutionaries. The book represents a shift away from the positions that Durgan expressed in his account of the POUM in Revolutionary History. Then the SWP hero-worshipped the POUM and glorified its political errors. Now Durgan is happy to accept a recent modernisation thesis, which depicts the POUM as a reactionary force opposing modernisation. The fact that Ealham must claim in his review that Durgan opposes Graham and Preston and their support for the Popular Front suggests that the SWP is still not ready to go along with this position in its public utterances. But Durgan’s position is a more accurate reflection of the SWP’s current politics and the party’s essentially middle-class liberal character.[2]

Durgan is not a Trotskyist and dismisses Trotsky’s writings on Spain with casual contempt, reducing the political conflict between Trotsky and POUM leader Andres Nin to mere personal animosity. He notes that Trotsky’s criticisms of Nin “seem particularly harsh.” However, as Talbot illustrates, the actual correspondence—letters of Trotsky show a remarkable patience and political clarity—in which Trotsky, even as late as June 1936 and two weeks after Franco’s coup, continued to reach out to Nin and proposed collaboration if Nin would adopt the banner of the Fourth International. The SWP cannot fairly engage with this material because doing so would validate Trotsky’s entire analysis and condemn the Popular Front politics that the SWP has practised throughout its history.

Tremlett’s book on Franco is just one among many of his works that explore the Spanish Civil War. His titles include “Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past” (2006), and “España: A Brief History of Spain” (2022), which highlights Spain’s lack of a singular, unified identity and showcases its rich, multicultural history as its defining trait. Additionally, “The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War” (2020) provides a detailed account of the foreign volunteers who fought against Franco’s forces during the war.

Tremlett’s book on the International Brigades is sympathetic and, by most accounts, thorough in its documentary research. The volunteers who went to Spain, about 35,000 from 50 countries, were often genuinely heroic, motivated by a strong aversion to fascism and a desire to take action. This deserves recognition. However, the Comintern directed the International Brigades under Stalinist control, tying their deployment to the broader political strategy of the Popular Front. This strategy aimed to subjugate the revolutionary workers’ movement to the “progressive” Spanish bourgeoisie and to show Western imperialist powers that Moscow could be trusted to uphold the capitalist order. Unfortunately, many liberal histories of the Brigades tend to overlook this political context honestly.

A further flaw in liberal interpretations of the Civil War, including Tremlett’s view, lies in their treatment of the non-intervention by Britain, France, and the United States. The liberal account suggests that a more supportive stance by Roosevelt or the French Popular Front might have saved the Republic. However, historical evidence shows that the Western “democracies” fully recognised that a revolutionary workers’ state in Spain posed a significant threat to their own class interests. Their “non-intervention” was not accidental but a deliberate class-based policy. Relying on these powers to save the Republic, as the Popular Front strategy aimed to do, was ultimately a political dead end.

This framework deliberately obscures the simultaneous revolution occurring alongside the war. In July 1936, when Franco initiated his coup, Spanish workers countered it in major cities through armed action. They took over factories, collectivised land, formed militias, and created workers’ institutions. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. As Hochschild’s analysis highlights, this revolutionary effort was not merely an aspect of the conflict but its very essence. Interestingly, it was not Franco but the Popular Front government and the Stalinist Communist Party, acting under Stalin’s directives, that upheld their alliance with the Western bourgeoisie and suppressed these revolutionary movements.

Another shortcoming in Tremlett’s book is the lack of a thorough explanation of how Franco managed to stay in power for so long. His extended rule requires a wider social analysis. Franco’s hold on power until 1975 was not solely due to repression; it also involved the accommodation of Western imperialism, which sought a stable anti-communist base in Iberia, and the Spanish bourgeoisie’s preference for “order” over democracy. The ongoing efforts by the Spanish right—including active-duty officers and the courts to rehabilitate Franco are not just about nostalgia. Instead, they serve as a warning that ruling elites, confronted with renewed class conflicts, are once again considering measures outside the constitutional framework.

The lessons from Spain go beyond mere historical curiosity. Marxists have consistently warned that the attempt by Spanish courts, the military, and the political right to rehabilitate Franco’s legacy reflects a larger global pattern among the ruling class moving toward authoritarianism, driven by austerity, inequality, and escalating class conflict. The answer is not to revive a new Popular Front, which could repeat the failures of the 1930s, but to foster a revolutionary socialist leadership from within the working class.

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[1] Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: Studies in European History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: New York, New York)

[2] Britain’s Socialist Workers Party lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War— http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp2-s17.html 

“If you don’t pay for it, you are the product”,

a 2018 article by Margaret McCartney

“Checking social media is the new opening the fridge when you’re not hungry.”

— Matthew Kobach

“Vulgarity is too mild a word for what unfolded on the steps of the museum, since vulgarity implies a coarse vitality. The 2026 gala was a pageant of decay so far gone in self-parody that one struggled to know whether to laugh, vomit, or check out eBay for a working replica of Dr Guillotin’s invention.”[1]

David North

The Twittering Machine is a provocative and often insightful book, drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and political economy to argue that social media is not a neutral tool but a machine that reshapes minds.

Oliver Eagleton, in his review of the book, remarked that a “cadre of cyber-utopian theorists” was instrumental in reshaping subjectivity, attracting attention, and profiting from provoking outrage and anxiety. Eagleton commended the book, acknowledging Seymour as a significant voice. He emphasised that the book provides a critical analysis of social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook, and similar sites, concentrating on their role as catalysts of addiction and compulsive self-disclosure within the “social industry.”[2]

Eagleton is right to point out the genuine merits in parts of Seymour’s critique.  He points out that the platforms are not neutral public spaces; they are capitalist enterprises whose business model is the commodification of human attention and social interaction. He is right that the dopamine-loop dynamics of “likes,” retweets, and algorithmic amplification are deliberately engineered to maximise engagement at the cost of critical thought. And he is right that the platforms have become instruments of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff has also analysed.[3]

The Pseudo Lefts and Social Media

However, the book’s limitations reflect Seymour’s own political limitations. Seymour is associated with the British pseudo-left, a product of the Socialist Workers Party milieu, who moved toward a kind of post-Marxist cultural politics after the SWP’s crisis. His analytical toolkit leans heavily on psychoanalysis (particularly Lacanian concepts) and Frankfurt School-inflected critical theory rather than on classical Marxism. This leads to some characteristic weaknesses:

Social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack have become dominant spaces where pseudo-left politics often replicates itself, for understandable reasons. The pseudo-left’s focus isn’t on comprehensive political education for workers or on forming a revolutionary party. Instead, it centres on gaining visibility, developing a brand, and wielding cultural influence within a specific segment of the educated upper-middle class. Social media is suited for this because it fosters outrage, identity-driven appeals, and viral controversies, all without requiring a solid theoretical or historical foundation. What looks like “left politics” online is largely a spectacle: hashtag campaigns, call-out culture, aesthetic radicalism, and the promotion of individual influencers as proxies for real political programs. The pseudo-left thrives here because it doesn’t need to organise workers; it only needs to attract followers who already share its class outlook.

The most critical point that liberal and pseudo-left critics of social media systematically miss is the class-directed character of censorship on these platforms. It is not random or neutral. The World Socialist Website (WSWS) was one of the first to document and expose the coordinated campaign by Google, Facebook, and Twitter to suppress left-wing, anti-war, and socialist content. The pseudo left’s response, “break up big tech,” regulate the platforms, and bring antitrust suits, is utterly inadequate. The problem is not that these monopolies are too big; it is that they are private property at all. A society that allows a single individual to own the communications infrastructure through which billions of people engage with public life has already surrendered democratic governance to the capitalist oligarchy.

The Oligarchs and Social Media

A significant flaw in the book is Seymour’s emphasis on sociological and psycho-cultural factors, which undermines a comprehensive class-based analysis. He mainly focuses on subjects, drives, libidinal investments, and the “social industry,” but neglects a thorough materialist critique of platforms as capitalist monopolies. This includes their ties to finance capital, involvement in state surveillance, and crucially, the class struggles of those who control or are harmed by them. The working class, with its unique interests and potential for revolutionary change, is barely discussed. Instead, “users” are portrayed as a uniform group of compulsive individuals, overlooking their exploitation—where their data and attention are appropriated by monopoly capital.

The connection between oligarchs and social media is a vital and complex issue at the core of current politics. This relationship is not accidental; it reflects a basic social truth: the most influential communications system in history is owned and controlled by a few billionaires, who leverage it as a tool for class domination.

In Seymour’s defence, he’s not the only one allowing social media oligarchs free rein. In The Social Dilemma (2020), Jeff Orlowski offers what some critics view as a brave exposé of the social media industry, including interviews with former employees and executives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other tech giants. It highlights significant concerns about how these platforms influence human psychology and negatively impact society.

However, the WSWS’s Joanne Laurier was heavily critical of the film, saying the “film proceeds to treat social media entirely apart from any discussion of economic life and trends, including the important issue of who owns the giant tech companies and which class interests they pursue. In the movie, the learned “experts” discuss issues such as mental health and threats to democracy entirely apart from the massive economic and social crisis and the moves toward authoritarianism by the ruling elite.

The movie insists that people need to self-censor on social media. If not, the state should step in, as its lead analyst, Harris (himself a millionaire), advocated at the Senate hearing. The real target of mass censorship implemented by the technology giants, on behalf of the state, is the left-wing political opposition, including workers’ use of social media to organise strikes and protests outside existing unions. Google, Facebook, Reddit, and other outlets have systematically targeted the WSWS. Having no social reforms to offer, the ruling elites see censorship and repression as the only means by which to prop up their rule. Consciously or not, the makers of The Social Dilemma offer their services in this endeavour.[4]

What Is to Be Done?

Seymour’s book concludes without suggesting a clear political direction. While criticizing the platforms, the implied solutions are limited to encouraging users to be more reflective or to acknowledge the platform’s underlying logic. It lacks any vision for engaging the working class politically, connecting to the fight for democratic oversight of communication tools, or advocating for the nationalization of platforms under workers’ management. This reflects the characteristic of the cultural-critical approach that has mostly overtaken socialist politics in pseudo-left groups: insightful critique but ultimately powerless.

In sum, The Twittering Machine is a culturally alert but politically limited book. It sees capitalism’s symptoms more clearly than it sees capitalism itself, and it has no perspective for the working class as the agent of social transformation. It is the kind of book that is intellectually stimulating for a certain layer of the educated middle class while leaving the working-class reader with no road forward.

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[1] What is it about the Met fashion gala that leads one to think fondly of the guillotine?

[2] Mind Forged Manacles? New Left Review 120 Nov/Dec 2019.

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

[4] The Social Dilemma: The “curse” of social media- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/20/dile-o20.html

“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”

Margaret Cavendish

“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock’s 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.

The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but “a complete break with the feudal past,” of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.

Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a “precursor” to Marxist dialectical materialism.

This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.

The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.

Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.

Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.

Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.

This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a “revolutionary”; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.

The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family’s wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.

As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.

Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn’t change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]

Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist “revolutionary”.

This approach reflects more the concerns of today’s upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish’s intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the “revolutionary” framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.

Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname “Mad Madge” for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish’s gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.

She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.

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[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html