“Future historians will know the General Strike for what it is, a landmark in British history and its most important post-war event.  A general strike is not an accident due to incidental causes, workmen misguided by agitators, the stock shibboleths of the Tory Press. It is a major political phenomenon ultimately springing from the profound dislocation of the entire economic and social system. Nothing else can so move millions of men to united action. It is the class-war in its most acute pre-revolutionary stage: the next stage is revolution.”

C. L. R. James

“The conclusion which I reach in my study is that Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals… Britain is moving towards revolution because the epoch of capitalist decline has set in. And if culprits are to be sought, then in answer to the question who and what are propelling Britain along the road to revolution, we must say: not Moscow, but New York.”

Leon Trotsky

“The only class I am afraid of is our own”

J.R. Clynes, Labour Party Politician

“What I dreaded about the strike, more than anything else, was this; if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened … That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted, at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army.”

J.H. Thomas, Trade Union Leader

It is hard not to agree with the points made by the Socialist Equality Party in its comments on the 1926 General Strike anniversary: “There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being a decisive moment in the history of the British and international working class.  What will distinguish the SEP’s meetings from the slew of commemorative articles and books on 1926 is an examination of the general strike primarily from the standpoint of the disastrous line pursued by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), led by Joseph Stalin and his allies.”[1]

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 is one of many slews published in the last few months. Described as a fresh, accessible history of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary – telling a story of working-class community then and now, “it is one of the better books on the subject. It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days.

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor, feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant.

Both Cant and Lee write for the Notes from Below website. It is a working‑class repository of workplace testimony, petitions and grassroots labour reporting. It performs an important practical function: documenting the lived experience of workers, exposing employer abuses, and creating links between isolated shop‑floor struggles. For that reason alone, such initiatives deserve defence and engagement by socialists. But a class‑struggle analysis requires us to go beyond sympathetic description to evaluate the political and strategic implications of the material and the direction this sort of project advances.[2]

The reappearance of rank‑and‑file initiatives and worker blogs is a product of the deepening crisis of capitalism. As employers accelerate restructuring, automation and outsourcing, and as union bureaucracies increasingly organise class collaboration with management and the state, workers are forced to build their own communication platforms. This social reality accords with the need for independent rank-and-file initiatives and organisations.

Notes From Below primarily offers empirical materials: testimonies, minutes, and petitions. This is indispensable for breaking information blackouts and building solidarity. But empirical documentation by itself is not a political program. Lenin long argued that trade‑unionist economism — which confines politics to immediate economic demands and local grievances — will not by itself develop the conscious leadership required to overthrow capitalist rule; political consciousness must be consciously brought to the working class by a revolutionary organisation. Worker‑produced media can and should serve as a training ground for political education. Still, without explicit political independence and a program that links struggles to the need to overthrow capital, such projects can be outflanked by reformism and the trade‑union apparatus.[3]

So what are the lessons of the General Strike for today’s struggles? Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken place in the UK.

The action was launched in response to a massive attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing defeat.

But material conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Political leadership and organisation do. As Chris Marsden explains in his lecture, the decisive factor in the defeat was not only the state’s preparation—organisations for strikebreaking, emergency powers and armed forces—but also the political line imposed by the Comintern under Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev. That line subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to an alliance with the Trades Union Congress via the Anglo‑Russian Committee, treating the TUC General Council and its “left” representatives as safe conduits for “revolutionary” influence rather than exposing and combating them. The result was a catastrophic political misorientation: the CPGB was transformed into a left‑ginger group for the bureaucracy at the very moment when the class struggle required independent revolutionary leadership.[4]

The general strike of May 1926 was not merely a historical rupture confined to its nine official days; it was a concentrated expression of the objective crisis of British capitalism and the political maturity (and immaturity) of the working class at that historical juncture.  The reader should note that a Marxist materialist analysis locates its significance in the interaction of social forces—the objective erosion of British imperialist power, the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the class relations that produced both immense industrial potential and profound political weakness.

The general strike objectively posed “which class shall rule?” The working class in 1926 had the industrial capacity to disrupt capitalist reproduction yet lacked a party capable of transforming industrial militancy into political power. As Marsden’s 1926 strike lecture emphasises, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Comintern-influenced Communist Party acted to contain and demobilise revolutionary potential. The result was a strategic defeat whose lessons include the catastrophic consequences when the labour bureaucracy or opportunist “lefts” substitute themselves for proletarian political independence.

A century later, objective conditions again make a general strike a live political possibility. Global capitalism is convulsed by stagnation, inflation, war and austerity. It is important to see the connection between the historical weaknesses exposed in 1926 and the present-day degeneration of unions and reformist parties. The trade union apparatus today often functions as a corporatist arm of capital, seeking to manage and suppress rather than lead independent working-class offensives.

The social weight of the working class, its international integration, and the development of rank-and-file initiatives create objective conditions far more favourable to revolutionary politics than those that existed in 1926.

1926 is not an exhausted archive; it is a living repository of lessons for 2026. Capital’s crisis, the bankruptcy of union bureaucracies and the emergence of rank-and-file militancy mean the objective possibility of a general strike—and with it, the political question of power—again stands on the agenda. The working class must learn from the past not to repeat its errors: organise democratically in the workplaces, coordinate internationally, and build the independent revolutionary leadership necessary to turn strikes into a socialist strategy. The future is written in the material contradictions of the present; the past supplies the lessons to read it.

Notes

The General Strike at the National Archives- http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-general-strike/

[1] Socialist Equality Party (UK) announces public meeting series on 1926 general strike-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/09/fhfg-a09.html

[2] https://notesfrombelow.org/

[3] See (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?).

[4]. The new pamphlet by Mehring Books (UK), “Trotsky, Stalin and the 1926 British General Strike: Lessons For Today”.

Chris Hayes is one of the more articulate voices on the “left.” His 2025 book, The Sirens’ Call, is well written and at times thoughtful. However, his politics are mostly characteristic of the petty‑bourgeois layer that passes for the contemporary media “left”: critical in tone, reformist in content, and ultimately subordinate to the interests and institutions of the ruling class.

Hayes—formerly a prominent host on MSNBC and a widely read public intellectual—has for years occupied a political position that illustrates the contradictions and dangers of the media “left.” His arguments, style and role function not as an organ of working-class struggle but as a channel by which layers of the petty-bourgeoisie and professional-class radicals are integrated into the interests and strategies of the capitalist state.

Readers familiar with Hayes’s other books and media work will know that he operates within a media and institutional milieu whose social base is the upper strata of the middle class—journalists, academics, think-tank professionals, and professional managers. As far as  I can tell, Hayes is not linked to or is a member of any radical party, but for the sake of clarity, it would be safe to say that he is from the same social layer as other “pseudo-lefts”:

Hayes’ early career was spent within a network whose executives, shareholders, and advertising base are embedded in the capitalist class. As a recent article on the WSWS leading broadcasters and columnists “operate in effect as the public faces of their respective firms” and must conform to corporate priorities to keep their platforms and fortunes” Hayes’s career has largely been spent making criticisms acceptable only up to the point where they do not threaten corporate clients, advertisers, financial interests or imperialist foreign policy He is a prime example of how individual dissent is tolerated so long as it stabilises, rather than challenges, the system. I doubt we will see Hayes on the barricades anytime soon.

During Hayes’s former program, he often performed the ritual of exposing outrages (inequality, racism, corruption), but the structural constraints of corporate ownership limited the reach of those critiques. The result is a media ecology where “critical” voices reinforce, rather than rupture, the legitimacy of capitalist institutions by confining debate within narrow parameters. Hayes’s style—moral passion, policy technocracy, and denunciations of right-wing reaction—fits this social function. He channels legitimate anger at inequality into policy reforms, electoralism, and crusades within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. This can radicalise public sentiment, but simultaneously diverts class anger into institutional remedies that leave capitalist property relations intact.

The political consciousness of media commentators like Hayes does not develop in a political vacuum. Their professional positions are secured by corporate media conglomerates, venture capital, and advertising markets embedded in global capitalism. The need to retain access to funding sources, advertising revenue, and elite networks naturally inclines such figures toward compromises with state and corporate power. The result: a politics of “reform” that is simultaneously anti‑Trump, pro‑liberal intervention, and protective of the neoliberal order’s basic rules.

The same political outlook that guides Hayes’s media work is carried into his books. No more so than in The Siren’s Call. Hayes knows his audience. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, he knows his song before he starts singing. The Siren’s Call, like much of the punditry produced within the corporate media, performs an important political function: it channels popular anger and democratic anxieties into narratives that stop short of challenging the economic and class foundations of society. His audience is politically conscious but still embedded within the institutions of the bourgeois state and corporate media. This book is written to diagnose social problems accurately enough to win credibility—unequal power, corrupt elites, erosion of democratic norms—but then it prescribes solutions that leave capitalism fundamentally untouched.

To sum up, the siren call that Hayes and his Pseudo-Left friends offer—reform, managerial solutions, moralism—must be answered by a socialist perspective capable of ending capitalist rule.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”

George Orwell 1984

“One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilisation.”

John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)

“History is the study of all the world’s crime.”

Voltaire, French writer and philosopher (1694-1778)

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Alan Bennett, English playwright (1934- )

A People’s History of Portugal is a valuable reconstruction of the last two hundred years of class struggle in Portugal. Raquel Varela writes, “In A People’s History of Portugal, written with Roberto della Santa, we develop the idea that Portuguese capitalism was dependent on British capitalism, in the sense of Ellen Wood’s notion of capitalism being exported by the British Empire to the periphery and semi-periphery”.[1]

Raquel Varela and Roberto Della Santa are contemporary historians whose work on Portugal must be assessed not as an abstract literary or moral account but as a political and social explanation rooted in concrete class relations. The central question posed by Santa and Varela and their “people’s history” is: which social forces and material conditions produced the events described, and how did political forms (parties, the army, unions) mediate the class struggle in Portugal?

Both Raquel Varela’s and Roberto Della Santa’s work belongs to a broad current in historiography often called the people’s history genre: recovering the struggles, experiences and agency of oppressed groups omitted from elite-centred narratives. This genre has considerable value insofar as it corrects bourgeois forgetfulness and restores the working class and oppressed peoples to the centre of historical inquiry.

One of the most important exponents of the genre put this way: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backwards looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience”.[2]

While this genre is legitimate and entirely worthwhile, the reader should know that, from the standpoint of orthodox Marxism, the recovery of forgotten facts is only the first step. Marxist historiography insists that facts be integrated into a scientific, materialist explanation that locates political consciousness and social movements in the social relations of production, class antagonisms and objective economic laws.

The father of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov insisted that institutions, laws, and human ideas must be explained by deeper material relations and class interests, writing “The historical development of mankind is reasonable in the sense that it is law-governed; but the law-governed nature of historical development does not yet prove at all that its ultimate cause must be sought in the views of men or in their opinions”.[3]

Why is Varela’s and Santa’s A People’s History of Portugal an important popular intervention? Because it recovers the social struggles, popular organisations and class conflicts that conventional bourgeois national histories either marginalise or explain away. From a classical Marxist standpoint, the value of Varela’s work lies less in doctrinal purity than in its insistence that classes and masses make history or as Karl Marx put it so succinctly ““Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[4]

From the standpoint of a materialist conception of history, the people’s history method has two strengths: it exposes elite crimes and centres subordinate agency; and, in doing so, it helps break the ideological monopoly of official history. It also has its limits, as Marxist historian Tom Mackaman pointed out in his assessment of Howard Zinn. “ While it helps bring to light facts omitted from standard textbooks, Zinn’s work can only serve as a beginning in understanding US history. There is an unmistakable anachronistic, even a-historical, thread in A People’s History. If it has a theme, it is an endless duel between “resistance” and “control,” two of Zinn’s preferred words.

Populating his historical stage are, on the one side, a virtually unbroken line of “Establishment” villains who exercise this control and, on the other, benighted groups who often struck out against their plight. The names and dates change; the story does not. Complexity and contradiction do not rest comfortably in such a schema. The limitations of this approach are most evident in Zinn’s treatment of the American Revolution and the US Civil War, which he presents as instances of the elite beguiling the population to strengthen its control”.[5]

Raquel Varela’s erudition is plain to see in this scholarly book. Her work is noted for its attention to labour, popular movements and transnational dimensions of working-class struggle. She makes an important empirical contribution by documenting struggles and networks often neglected by mainstream historiography. Her work helps restore the subjectivity and agency of the working class to historical study, an indispensable corrective to bourgeois historiography.

But from the standpoint of Marxist science, any historiography must move beyond documentation to explanation, and that requires a mapping of the class composition and material interests of actors. It also needs an analysis of how material constraints shaped state and party forms. If left at the level of primarily descriptive, it can be hijacked by reformism or identity politics. Unfortunately, most books of this genre fall into this ideological trap.

In this book, Varela writes of the experiences of peasants, workers, and popular movements — showing how changes in production, imperialism and property relations shape politics and ideas. Varela’s narrative demonstrates how Portugal’s late and dependent capitalist development, colonial plunder and landlordism produced a fragmented bourgeoisie, a precarious working class and mass emigration — objective conditions that repeatedly gave rise to political radicalisation.

Varela and Santa reconstruct crucial episodes — the liberal revolutions, the rise of the republic, the consolidation of Salazar’s Estado Novo, the colonial wars, and the Carnation Revolution of 1974 — as outcomes of deeper economic and social contradictions. [6] Varela’s people-centred focus complements previous historiography showing how popular assemblies, strikes and local organisations expressed and attempted to resolve those objective contradictions. The book makes clear that Portugal’s political oscillations — reactionary regimes, fragile reformisms, anti-colonial wars — were not merely the result of individual leaders but rooted in capitalist development and imperial relations. The book is valuable because, by narrating the lives and struggles of ordinary people, Varela helps break bourgeois historiographical isolation of politics from production and class interest.

While invaluable as social history, Varela is not an orthodox Marxist, and her account can only understate the decisive political question of leadership.  The Carnation Revolution contained both an immense revolutionary potential and a political defeat: social democracy, Stalinism and pseudo-left currents helped channel working-class power back into capitalist institutions.[7]

Raquel Varela’s A People’s History of Portugal is well worth reading, and I would recommend this book. It is a crucial corrective to elite-centred history: it returns the reader to popular agency, material forces and class struggle. Despite its limitations, it offers a rich source of historiography and allows for rigorous analysis by general readers and Marxists alike. Only by combining social-historical recovery with Leninist-Trotskyist political organisation can the working class carry out the socialist transformation of society. Given the rise of Trump and his fascist oligarchy, this is an urgent historical necessity.

Notes

Social Conflicts in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974–1975: Raquel Varela and Joana Alcântara Le Travail, FALL 2014 AUTOMNE, Vol. 74

Raquel Varela. A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution. Ed. By Peter Robinson. Transl. [from Portuguese] by Sean Purdy. Pluto Press

Fifty years since Portugal’s Carnation Revolution-Paul Mitchell- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/24/fgtz-a24.html

[1] https://raquelcardeiravarela.wordpress.com/2024/05/01

[2] The Making of the English Working Class-E P Thompson

[3] Georgi Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History

[4] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[5] Howard Zinn, 1922-2010-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/02/zinn-f15.html

[6] See https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-review-of-raquel-varela-peoples.html

[7] See https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-portuguese-workers-revolution-1974.html

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”

William Wordsworth

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

― John Milton, Areopagitica

“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”

Karl Marx

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

To say that this small book of just 47 pages has gone under the radar would be an understatement. A Google and Bing search has produced no mention, reviews, or even an image of the book cover. A scenario that would not look out of place in Stalin’s Russia or in George Orwell’s 1984. This is all the stranger since Andrew Milner is a significant scholar and has produced a substantial amount of work on John Milton.

John Milton (1608–1674) is best known for Paradise Lost. He was also a vigorous political writer (Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) who defended freedom of conscience and republican principles in the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s work is historically and culturally useful. He illuminates the ideas and political disputes of the 17th‑century bourgeois revolution in England, the rise of parliamentary power, and the ideological roots of modern notions of liberty and censorship.

Milner is a member of the British Socialist Workers Party and a Marxist literary scholar who has situated John Milton’s poetry and prose within the political and social context of the English Revolution. In this small book, Milner seeks to show how Milton’s imagery, rhetoric and political tracts are bound up with the emergent class formations, religious conflicts and ideological struggles of seventeenth‑century England. He is primarily known as a literary and cultural theorist; his work deals with ideology, culture, and intellectual history. His work addresses ideology, aesthetics and the left’s intellectual history. That terrain is important because ideology shapes class consciousness, and the battle over ideas is a necessary front in the class struggle.

However, cultural analysis alone cannot substitute for a rigorous political-economic account of property relations, surplus appropriation and class power. Classical Marxism holds that consciousness is rooted in material conditions; therefore, cultural critiques must be integrated into analyses of the social relations of production and the balance of class forces. Milton’s poetry and prose are embedded in the English revolutionary conjuncture. His biblical epic and tragic forms are works where he questions authority, liberty, and social order. Milner reads Milton’s theological motifs as ideological representations tied to emergent bourgeois and republican tendencies, while also acknowledging the contradictions and ambiguities in Milton’s voice.

Milner’s body of work, including this book, situates the poet within the political and social convulsions of the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s poetry and prose are productive areas for analysing how class conflict, ideology, and revolutionary consciousness are represented, contested and mythologised in literature. Studying Milton through Milner’s revolutionary eyes teaches how literature both reflects and shapes class consciousness.

Socialist Workers Party

At this point, it is worth examining Milner’s politics. Milner, as was said, is a member of the British SWP, which does not represent orthodox Marxism. Along with comrades in the SWP, he belongs to a tradition that broke with orthodox Trotskyism in the mid‑20th century and developed the state‑capitalist analysis of the USSR (most associated with figures like Tony Cliff).

For Cliff and the International Socialism tendency, regimes that nationalised industry but retained wage labour and commodity production were analysed as forms of capitalism in which the state functions as the collective capitalist; thus, they rejected the Trotskyist formulation of a degenerated workers’ state and argued for an independent revolutionary strategy oriented to overthrowing bureaucratic rule. In the 2010s, it was riven by a political and moral crisis around leadership, internal democracy and allegations of sexual abuse. 

Although Milner’s book illuminates how bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois cultural forms mediate working-class experience, it still risks idealism if detached from concrete, empirical investigation of the organisation of production and the state. Some critics have argued that Milner collapses literary meaning into class interest, treating Milton as merely an ideological mouthpiece of a social class rather than a complex, contradictory subject. Perhaps a more serious charge, one in which the great historian Christopher Hill was also charged with, was cherry-picking passages or contexts that fit a class‑interest thesis while ignoring counter‑evidence in Milton’s prose and reception.

In the book, Milner cites Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson as early influences. It is entirely correct to look at the work of these major historians when it comes to evaluating John Milton.

Christopher Hill treated seventeenth‑century literature as part of a revolutionary conjuncture. Hill’s interpretive stance is class-centred and teleological. He reads Milton as embedded in the Puritan radical tradition. He locates literary production within the contours of political conflict, ideology, and mobilisation. This is the Marxist tradition in history that emphasises the structures and social forces that shape ideas—Milton becomes a voice within a contested social order.

Hill’s major contribution was to relocate the English Revolution from a narrow constitutional dispute among elites into a broad social and cultural upheaval rooted in class conflict. Works such as Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England and The World Turned Upside Down argue that the upheavals of the 1640s were driven by changing material conditions—agrarian transformation, commercial expansion, and the rise of new classes and layers within the population—thereby producing religious and political movements ranging from Puritans to Levellers and Diggers. Hill’s method was classic historical materialism: ideas and texts are treated as expressions of social forces and class interests rather than as autonomous abstractions.

Hill emphasised the dialectical interaction between structural changes and conscious political action: material crises opened space for radical ideas, which in turn reshaped social relations until countervailing forces produced new stabilisations. His sensitivity to popular religion, millenarianism, and the “culture of protest” made visible the agency of Milton’s political tracts—Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his numerous pamphlets—which must be read as ideological interventions in the convulsive politics of the 1640s and 1650s. Milton defended republican sovereignty, individual conscience and vehement opposition to censorship; his positions reflected a fragment of the emergent bourgeois‑republican current and the layers of intellectuals allied with parliamentary and anti‑royalist forces. His great epic, Paradise Lost, also encodes the metaphysical and moral anxieties of a society undergoing revolutionary reconfiguration.

On the other hand, E. P. Thompson, by contrast, insisted on the agency, experience and consciousness of social subjects. Where Hill stresses the structures and propensities of classes, Thompson recovers lived mentality: culture is both produced by and constitutive of working-class self-activity. Applied to Milton, Thompson’s method would press you to examine how Milton’s language and political interventions circulated among social groups, how readers appropriated or resisted his ideas, and how ideological formations were lived and transformed.

Andrew Milner’s work on John Milton situates Milton’s poetry and prose within the political struggles of seventeenth‑century England and the emergence of the modern public sphere. Milner shows Milton not simply as an isolated literary genius but as a political writer whose formal choices—pamphlet rhetoric, epic mode, religious imagery—intervene in class conflict, state formation and the struggle over free speech. Milner’s contributions to cultural theory enrich our understanding of ideology and intellectual history. Still, they cannot replace the scientific analysis of class, property and state that classical Marxism provides.