Tag: history

The Fiery Spirits: Popular Protest, Parliament and the English Revolution by John Rees, Hardcover – 22 April 2025, Verso publication

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 “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Tom Paine

“The sensible way to proceed — I think this is how Marx and Engels proceeded — is to develop a methodological view: historical materialism or dialectical materialism, whatever you want to call it. Then, you approach any material with that framework in mind, but you have to be able to go where the material leads you. Engels warned that you cannot start forcing the historical material into a ready-made format. I took that approach with my book. Of course, I had read a great deal of secondary material, but I wanted to go where the historical archives and contemporary material would take me. I did not wish to influence my work, nor did I intend to engage in debates with other Marxists or currents, in order to determine where history would go. After you have done that, you can demarcate it and illuminate it by — in a relatively minor way — dealing with other currents and approaches. What makes something Marxist is that it is the application of that method. “

John Rees

John Rees’s Fiery Spirits offers a new perspective on the English Revolution.  Fiery Spirits establishes Rees as the leading contemporary continuator of the Marxist tradition, initiated by Christopher Hill and Brian Manning in writing the history of the 17th-century English revolution.

The latest book complements both Rees’s PhD thesis and his The Leveller Revolution, as well as his most recent publication, Marxism and the English Revolution. Rees is a gifted historian, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. It neither downplays nor overplays the Fiery Spirits, presenting a relatively objective assessment of their role in the English Revolution.[1]

Like the great historian Christopher Hill, Rees is sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king, and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. The Fiery Spirits, who were some of the revolution’s ideologues, ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent to justify some theory that explained their actions.

Rees’s new perspective centres on a small group of highly influential MPs. These “fiery spirits” played a significant role in shaping the course of the English bourgeois revolution, which ultimately led to the establishment of an English republic. Through their radical parliamentarianism, combined with mass protest, these revolutionaries pushed the revolution forward to its conclusion.

Rees is careful not to elevate these Fiery Spirits above the role played by Oliver Cromwell, who was, after all, the leader of the English revolution. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky once wrote, “ Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is, in this sense, immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”[2]

One of the main tasks Rees had was to rescue these “Fiery Spirits” from what E.P. Thompson once wrote was the “condensation of history”. They have been buried under a large number of dead dogs, and it is to Rees’s credit that he has rescued them. Henry Marten, Peter Wentworth, Alexander Rigby, and others deserve their place in history, and this work traces the radicalism of these Fiery Spirits in some cases back to the reign of Elizabeth I.

Dominic Alexander makes an interesting point in his review of Rees’s book: He writes, “In one sense, this partial continuity is evidence of how deeply the causative factors of the English Revolution were ingrained in the nation’s history. The conflict was not, as many revisionist historians have tended to argue, a mere accidental product of contingent events and personalities. The Fiery Spirits is, however, not so much a riposte to that vein of argument as it is a response to a more interesting one about the autonomy of the political sphere in the unfolding of the Revolution. The long pre-history of the parliamentary opposition faction is one proof that even granting the relative independence of the political sphere, causation there also runs deep into the history of early modern England”.[3]

Rees’s book presents a relatively orthodox Marxist understanding of the English bourgeois revolution and its leading actors. It is therefore perhaps surprising how little Rees uses the work of Leon Trotsky; there is no direct quote of Trotsky in any of Rees’s latest books. For any Marxist, Trotsky should be the basic starting point for any analysis of revolutions and their actors.

Trotsky writes, “The English revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a profound revolution that shook the nation to its core, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. Initially, the royal power, resting on the privileged classes or the upper echelons of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are closely associated with it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London.” [4]For Rees, this “dual Power began in the very early part of the 17th century.

The hallmark of a good book is that even seasoned readers who have studied this period for ages can learn something new. Rees presents new material that highlights the extraordinary level of factionalism and revolt that preceded the outbreak of revolution. From an early period, the Fiery Spirits led this rebellion. As Alexander writes, “The connections between the activities of the radicals in the Commons and the popular movement became, as Rees shows, the key dynamic driving events in the years 1640-1. The fiery spirits were indeed a minority in the Commons. Still, the weight of popular support behind their moves, such as Henry Marten’s during the struggle over the attainder of the King’s chief advisor Earl Strafford, meant that, as in this instance, ‘the course of events proceeded on the path that Marten advocated, not that which Pym still trod’ (pp.163-4). Indeed, during this confrontation, which led to Strafford’s execution, Pym lost control of parliament. Popular mobilisations against Strafford made the difference; one MP wrote, ‘unless this Earl be sacrificed to public discontentment I see not what hopes we have of peace’ (p.165).[5]

The Great historian E. H Carr was fond of saying, “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” This maxim should be applied to Rees. The Fiery Spirits is, without doubt, a significant addition to our understanding of the English bourgeois revolution. It contains new detailed research and reinterprets significant episodes and stages of events. Rees recalibrates our understanding of the revolution from a historical materialist standpoint. However, to what extent you could describe Rees as a revisionist is open to conjecture.

When I asked AI this question, its reply was “while John Rees engages with historical revisionism to some extent, his primary framework is that of Marxist historiography, which is distinct from the broader category of revisionist historians who challenge traditional interpretations.”  Not much help.

There is something Jesuitical about Rees’s ability to write history from a relatively orthodox Marxist perspective while retaining the political outlook of a pseudo-left. He appears to retain the ability to compartmentalise his mind and pursue a scientific Marxist approach to history, up to the point where his radical politics, to some extent, draw the line. He is perhaps aided by an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life, which enables him to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never bring him into direct conflict with his political organisation, Counterfire, on political questions.

Speaking of which, in a previous article, I wrote this: “Rees was a member of the SWP before leaving to found the Counterfire group in 2010, as a significant split from the SWP. Counterfire specialises in providing a platform for the remnants and detritus of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of the power and longevity of capitalism and is hostile to the working class and genuine socialism. Counterfire and Rees’s occasional use of Marxist phrases, and even rarer references to the Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, are for the sole purpose of opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. Counterfire’s self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are bitterly opposed to the orthodox Marxism represented by the World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Parties, and the International Committee of the Fourth International. “[6]

While I do not personally subscribe to Rees’s political outlook, I can nonetheless recommend this book as highly as his previous work. Rees is a historian well worth reading, and it should be interesting to see what he is working on next. As Ann Talbot wrote about Hill which equally applies to Rees “A historian that stands head and shoulders above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him closely.[7]

[1] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf

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

[3] https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-fiery-spirits-popular-protest-parliament-and-the-english-revolution-book-review/

[4] Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931)

[5] https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-fiery-spirits-popular-protest-parliament-and-the-english-revolution-book-review/

[6] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/2024/09/18/marxism-and-the-english-revolution-john-rees-whalebone-press-2024-15-00/

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

Hiroshima by John Hersey – Penguin Modern Classics 208 pages 2001

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“Such clouds had risen that there was a sort of twilight around … The day grew darker and darker,”

John Hersey 

“In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.”

James P Cannon[1]

The appearance of people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. … They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance, you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or back. … Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind, like walking ghosts. … They didn’t look like people of this world.

An eyewitness

“The question now being asked, quietly but nervously, in capitals around the world is, where will this end? The once-unthinkable outcome—actual armed conflict between the United States and China—now appears possible for the first time since the end of the Korean War. In other words, we are confronting the prospect of not just a new Cold War, but a hot one as well.”

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

The 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima will be commemorated on August 6, 2025. This deliberate act of imperialist genocide will be forever etched in the memory of hundreds of millions of people as a war crime and a day that will live in infamy. However, despite the significant passage of time, the threat of global annihilation has stayed with us, and it is now openly talked about amongst the ruling elites around the world.[2]

Hiroshima is an extraordinarily well-written and vivid account of the complete and total annihilation of the city of Hiroshima. Hersey’s stunning piece of journalism reads like a novel. It is not surprising that it was voted the most important piece of American journalism of the 20th Century and deserves a wide readership as we come up to this 80th anniversary. Hersey was a pioneer of “New Journalism”, a movement that included the use of literary techniques in complex pieces in journalism. With the destruction from the bomb so complete, it must have crossed Hersey’s mind if there were any stories left to tell? Hersey answers in the affirmative. It is far from an easy read.

As Will Hersey (no relation) testifies, “It took me until this January, three-and-a-half decades later, to steel myself to find out. Hersey’s 30,000-word account of what happened to six survivors from moments just before 8.15 am on 5 August 1945 when the US Air Force B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” dropped its 9,700lb uranium bomb — somewhat grotesquely nicknamed “Little Boy” — is told almost entirely through their eyes: “Dr Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realised that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks.”[3]

Most of these stories were never told straight away. In the aftermath of the dropping of the bombs, the U.S ruling elite was mindful of the international reaction. Newspaper Editors and columnists throughout America denounced the silence and secrecy that had shrouded the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One editorial in the Monterey Peninsula Herald in Northern California called the US government “amoral fools”.

The government issued a complete media blackout and cover-up that even the Nazis would have approved of. No photographs or details of the murderous casualties were allowed to be published. Any reports had to be filed through the War Department. When enquiries were made as to whether the American bourgeoisie had dropped two atom bombs on unarmed civilians, the bomb was downplayed as a “labour-saving device” to speed up the end of the war. When reports came in that people were dying from radiation, they were dismissed as “Tokyo tales”.

This suppression of what happened in Hiroshima could not last for long, and as Hersey’s article came out, it made a massive impact. Newsstands quickly sold out. Excerpts ran in newspapers around the world. Hersey only allowed the serialisation on the condition that newspapers make contributions to the American Red Cross after publication. The article was read on the radio, in its entirety, over four consecutive nights. Albert Einstein is said to have ordered 1,000 copies for distribution.

As Steve Rothman writes, “The direct effect of ‘Hiroshima’ on the American public is difficult to gauge. No mass movement formed as a result of the article, no laws were passed, and the reaction to the piece probably didn’t have any specific impact on U. S. military strategy or foreign policy. But certainly the vivid depictions in the book must have been a strong contributor to a pervasive sense of dread (and guilt) about nuclear weaponry felt by many Americans ever since August 1945.”

The only real opposition to the war crime came from the Marxists with James P Cannon, leader of the American Socialist Workers Party, writing, “In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan… What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbour a Statue of Liberty, enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Long ago, the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilisation with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing humanity is socialism or annihilation!.

Hersey was working for Time magazine during his first visit to Japan to get first-hand reports and interviews. Given the dangers involved, it was a courageous thing to do. Over 50 people were interviewed for the article, which was later turned into a book.[4] Hersey’s talent as a writer is evident in the book. Still, his intelligence and kindness lay in letting people speak for themselves or describing what they witnessed shine through in comments like this, he writes, “Mrs Nakamura stood watching her neighbour, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen … the reflex of a mother set her in motion towards her children. She had taken a single step … when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room, over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

Hersey does not sanitised what happened when the bomb was dropped as this quote shows “He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove like pieces”; “their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”; “abandoned and helpless… beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face anymore”

According to The National WWII Museum, the bomb “engulfed the city in a blinding flash of heat and light. The temperature at ground level reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The bomb vaporised people half a mile away from ground zero. Bronze statues melted, roof tiles fused, and the exposed skin of people miles away burned from the intense infrared energy unleashed. At least 80,000 people died instantly. The bomb destroyed 70 per cent of all buildings in Hiroshima, and an estimated 140,000 people had been killed by the end of 1945. Survivors suffered from increased rates of cancer and chronic disease”.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History explained the aftermath of the explosion. “One man left only a dark shadow on the steps of a bank as he sat. … Many others in Hiroshima, farther from the Little Boy epicentre, survived the initial explosion but were severely wounded, including injuries from and burns across much of their body. Among these people, panic and chaos were rampant as they struggled to find food and water, medical assistance, friends and relatives and to flee the firestorms that engulfed many residential areas.”

There is only one weakness in the book, and unfortunately, it is a significant one. At no point does Hersey explain the reasons behind the dropping of the bombs or the geopolitical reasons behind the war crimes.

As the Marxist writer David Walsh explains, “The more profound motives behind the bombings involved American imperialism’s goal of terrorising the Soviet Union as part of the already unfolding Cold War. As the recent film Oppenheimer has made clear, “Trinity,” the code name for the first test of a nuclear weapon, was scheduled for July 16, 1945, so that Truman could hold the existence of the bomb over the heads of Stalin and the Soviet delegation at the Potsdam Conference, which opened the following day. According to this line of thinking, the US would not need to make concessions and could force the Soviet leadership to submit to its demands.

When the bomb was developed as part of the Manhattan Project, the Truman administration imagined that its supposed nuclear monopoly would ensure the hegemonic role of the US for years to come. This notion was considered delusional by scientists, who understood that it was only a matter of time before the USSR would develop the bomb. Truman was ignorant enough to assert that “those Asiatics” (in the Soviet Union) could never build so complicated a weapon.”[5]

It must be said that most of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project supported the use of the Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was only later that some regretted what they had done. A Manhattan Project scientist wrote to a friend, “I wept as I read John Hersey’s New Yorker account of what has happened during the past year to six who were lucky enough to survive Hiroshima. I am filled with shame to recall the whoopee spirit … when we came back from lunch to find others who had returned with the first extras announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. That evening we had a hastily arranged champagne dinner, some forty of us; … [we felt] relief at the relaxation of security, pride in our part in ending the war, and even pride in the effectiveness of the weapon. And at the exact moment, the bomb’s victims were living through an indescribable horror we didn’t realise. I wonder if we do yet.[6]

Robert Oppenheimer, who led the bomb project, was disquieted at what he had done, but he never apologised or expressed regret. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was a war crime in which he fully participated. He did have blood on his hands.

At the moment, Penguin has made no plans to release a new edition of the book to coincide with the 80th anniversary. This is surprising given that the threat of a new world war and nuclear annihilation is greater today than at any time since the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The fractious nature of world politics as seen in when Trump facetiously traded remarks with Kim Jong Un about the size of his nuclear button highlights that the very existence of these weapons of mass destruction pose a grave danger that at some point, in a time of intense crisis, they would be used against foreign foes or even domestic opposition.

As the historian Gabriel Jackson perceptively wrote, “… the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States—for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of government—blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.”

The recent release of the film Oppenheimer, which has struck a disturbing chord with audiences, shows there is a growing disquiet amongst people regarding the dangers of Nuclear war. The choice between Socialism and Barbarism could not be made starker.[7]

Notes

James P. Cannon-A: A Statement on the War(22 December 1941)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1941/dec/21.htm

The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker-Steve Rothman http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

[1] James P. Cannon on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “An unspeakable atrocity”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/cann-a07.html

[2] How to Survive the New Nuclear Age National Security in a World of Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi-Foreign Affairs July/August 2025

[3] John Hersey’s Hiroshima Is Still Essential Reading, 75 Years Later-www.esquire.com 23 April 2021

[4] www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31

[5] 78th anniversary of US atomic bombing of Hiroshima http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/07/fniq-a07.html

[6] The Publication of “Hiroshima” in The New Yorker-Steve Rothman http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

[7] Oppenheimer: A drama about “the father of the atomic bomb”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/27/znjf-j27.html

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History-By Laurence Rees Public Affairs, 2025

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We meet ordinary Germans who fell in line with a regime that promised them peace and prosperity. Interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, some still looked back wistfully to the days before the war. “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets,” recalled Erna Krantz from Bavaria. “There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”.

Laurence Rees

The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity.

Isaac Deutscher-

The most appropriate, indeed the only relevant, general proper name for the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust is “Germans.” They were Germans acting in the name of Germany and its highly popular leader, Adolf Hitler.

Daniel Goldhagen

“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

The Nazi Mind by the writer, historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees has been described as a “groundbreaking narrative history” of the motivations and mentalities behind the Nazis and their supporters. As will be seen in this critical review it is essentially a rehash of his previous histography that not only downplays the social and economic and political forces at play in the Nazis rise to power but compliments Daniel Goldhagen’s theoretical premise that “Ordinary Germans” were to blame for the rise of German fascism and the subsequent murder of six million jews.[1]

Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system to try and gain insight in to the psychological and social composition of the Nazis.

But as this perspective document elaborates “ Nazism was an expression of the most reactionary and brutal tendencies of German capitalism. That is the key to understanding it. Hitler’s rise from a Viennese homeless shelter and the trenches of World War I to becoming a megalomaniacal dictator cannot be explained by the social composition and psychology of his supporters. He owed his power to the ruling elite, which placed him at the head of the state. The millions that Thyssen, Krupp, Flick and other industrial magnates donated to the NSDAP, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by Hindenburg, the symbolic figurehead of the army, and finally the agreement of all the bourgeois parties to the Enabling Act are eloquent testimony to the fact that the vast majority of the ruling elite had placed themselves behind Hitler when all other mechanisms to suppress the working class had failed.

The members of the National Socialist movement originated, at least up to its seizure of power, almost exclusively from the middle classes. It recruited from among artisans, peddlers, the civil employees and peasants, whom the war, inflation and crisis had robbed of any faith in democratic parliamentarianism and who longed for order and an iron fist. At the head of the movement were officers and NCOs from the old army, who could not reconcile themselves to Germany’s defeat in World War I. However, the programme of the National Socialist movement was anything but petty bourgeois. It translated the basic needs of German imperialism into the language of mythology and racial theory. The dream of a “thousand-year Reich” and the hunger for “Lebensraum (living space) in the East” expressed the expansionist urge of German capital, whose dynamic productive forces were constricted by Europe’s closely meshed system of states. Racial hatred provided consolation for the German petty bourgeois in the face of his absolute powerlessness and prepared him for a war of extermination.”[2]

Program and perspective

One of the most notable aspects of Laurence Rees’s entire body of work, and that can be said of most historians writing on this subject, is the cursory attention given to issues of program and perspective. In all his books virtually nothing is said about the actual policies pursued by the Social Democrats and the Stalinists, from the German Communist party which demoralized and split the working class, and cleared the way for the Nazi victory. This disinterest dates back to when Rees wrote to me in 2008, saying “I’m afraid I simply didn’t have space to include a discussion of these issues- fascinating as they are – in the Behind Closed Doors book. I decided to begin the story in 1939 and therefore felt it wouldn’t be helpful to refer back to this history. I’m sure others would have written the book differently, but for better or worse, that’s what I thought was the right way forward. Equally, I’m afraid I can’t go into my views on Trotsky here, as I would need several thousand words to represent my thoughts on that intriguing time properly. I believe my friend, Professor Robert Service, is currently writing a comprehensive biography of Trotsky, so it will be exciting to see his thoughts on the subject.[3]

As I said to Laurence Rees at the time, Robert Service was a regrettable choice of historian to assist him with Trotsky. In 2010, Robert Service wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky.[4] The Marxist writer David North called the biography “character assassination”, writing that Trotsky: A Biography is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but rather an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.”[5]

While there are some things to like about Rees’s new book unfortunately it is a reflection of the current historical consensus that ordinary Germans played a crucial part in the rise of Nazis and bear indirect responsibility for the murder of six million jews in the Holocaust. Rees not only believes that “ordinary Germans” were to blame but “such horrors occurred not because the Nazis were Germans, but because they were human beings”.

Rees’s belief that all humans, given the chance, can be murdering fascist monsters echoes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, who believed that forces of human evil lurk deep in man’s soul or psyche. They can easily gain ascendancy, as they inevitably must, over the restraining moral influences of civilisation.

As North says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argued that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation, and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than it had been before that time. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.[6]

There is little new about this “new history”. Daniel Goldhagen’s book[7] set the benchmark for this so-called theory. Although a substantial number of historians condemned his book,[8] It still went on to poison the minds of a younger generation, which swallowed hook, line, and sinker his right-wing historiography.

Brandi Lopez, one of those younger historians, wrote in a 2016 essay: “The term ‘ordinary men’ was used throughout several of my sources.” It was about the people that became the leaders of the Nazi party, Hitler’s right hand men as well as the people that became soldiers following his orders blindly and in the end becoming willing executioners. These individuals began as ordinary men, farmers, fathers, and everyday people. In Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” Goldhagen’s basic thesis is that most German people became willing executioners in the Holocaust. He states, “eliminationist’ hostility toward the Jewish people was so deeply ingrained in Germany”, that’s how the people were willing to do whatever it took to rid the country of them.

In Laurence Rees’s “Auschwitz: A New History”, he mentions Hoss and his story. His family was a simple farming family, and for them to sell their goods, they had to go through a Jewish man. His father and mother ingrained in him that the Jewish man was scamming them out of money, and the reason his family struggled was because of this. Most of the people that were in the sample size said they resembled more of “real Nazis” than an “Ordinary German”. This article explores the theories of the perpetrators, the evidence, and ultimately, the sample size itself. Some graphs display a visual representation of the number of men who identified with a specific occupational rank, such as elite occupations, lower-middle-class workers, etc. [9]

The best refutation of Goldhagen’s “ordinary Germans” is by the Marxist David North, who wrote: The methodological flaw of Professor Goldhagen’s book is indicated in its title: Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by “ordinary Germans?” For those of you who would like a textbook example of an “abstract identity,” this is it. This is a category that is so broad, it is capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of Jewish parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an “ordinary” one? Is it a hefty girth and a fondness for knockwurst and sauerbraten? Is it blond hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the nude? Is it a talent for abstruse philosophizing and a passion for 300-pound Wagnerian sopranos? A concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes cannot be of any scientific value in the cognition of objective reality. But if we should attempt to include in our definition more serious sociological characteristics, the worthlessness of the concept of “ordinariness” becomes immediately apparent. In 1933, German society possessed a complex class structure. Was the “ordinary German” at the time of Hitler’s accession to power a factory worker, a ruined shopkeeper, a demoralized member of the lumpenproletariat, a heavily indebted peasant, an East Prussian land-owning Junker or an industrial magnate?

If all these elements of diverse social strata are to be lumped together as “ordinary Germans,” it simply means that the concept of “ordinariness” does not reflect the internal antagonisms and conflicts of German society as it existed in 1933. What Goldhagen, therefore, offers his readers is not a scientific examination of German society as it really was constituted in 1933, but rather—and it is unpleasant to say this—an idealized portrait of a homogeneous society that uncritically substantiates the Nazi myth of a unified German Volk, defined by race and blood.[10]

Another problem with Rees’s book is his take on the Holocaust; for Rees, the political, social and economic reasons for this terrible event are not important. What is essential for Rees is the psychological reasons behind the Nazis genocide of the Jews. Rees joins a long list of writers and historians for whom the Holocaust is unfathomable and should not even be attempted to be understood.

If a Marxist like Isaac Deutscher- can write “The fury of Nazism, which was bent on the unconditional extermination of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its reach, passes the comprehension of a historian, who tries to uncover the motives of human behaviour and to discern the interests behind the motives. Who can analyse the motives and the interests behind the enormities of Auschwitz? We are confronted here by a vast and ominous mystery of the degeneration of the human character that will forever baffle and terrify humanity. “What chance do the rest of us have?.

North answers, “ The situation is rationalised too often with the argument that the Holocaust is such a terrible event that it simply defies a rational explanation. If, as Adorno said, it was no longer possible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it was presumably also no longer possible to place much confidence in the historian’s ability to comprehend the forces that drive the social—or, more precisely, the antisocial—activity of man. Historical science and political theory were seen as powerless in the face of such unfathomable evil.[11]

As I mentioned earlier, there are some aspects to appreciate, but overall, Rees’s work perpetuates a very right-wing historiography. As Leon Trotsky once said, “Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners

[2] National Socialism and the Holocaust-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/09.htmlthe theory

[3] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/

[4] Trotsky A Biography-Robert Service-Pan 2010

[5] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html

[6] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[7] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Paperback – 1 Feb. 1997 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

[8] Historians criticise Goldhagen’s book-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/11/gold-n17.html

[9] Lopez, Brandi J., “German People and the Holocaust” (2016). Capstone Projects and Master’s Theses. 12. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/12

[10] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

[11] The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html

How to Spot a Fascist: Umberto Eco Harvill Secker Paperback – 13 Aug. 2020 Alastair McEwen (Translator), Richard Dixon (Translator)

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 “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.”

Leon Trotsky, in ” Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, “

“It would be so much easier for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares”. Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world.”

― Umberto Eco, Il fascismo Eterno

“ but we know. and have always said, that the bourgeoisie is attached to fascism. The bourgeois and fascism stand in the same relation to each other as do the workers and peasants to the Russian Communist Party.”

― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings: 1921-1926

“Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

― Jack London, The Iron Heel

How to Spot a Fascist is a collection of three distinct yet profoundly thought-provoking essays on freedom and fascism. ‘Ur-Fascism’ examines fourteen essential characteristics of fascism. Like the great German author Gunter Grass, Eco was briefly a young fascist. Unlike Grass[1] Eco was not vilified for it. When Mussolini was at the height of his power, Eco was a young child lacking the knowledge and capacity to grasp the criminal character of the organisation he was associated with. He Writes in “Ur-Fascism:

“In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.”

Umberto Eco was undoubtedly one of the greatest writers and historians of the 20th Century. If he were still alive during this modern period of history, he would not have hesitated in calling the latest incumbent in the White House a fascist.  Donald Trump fits most of the criteria cited by Eco in his 1995 essay.

Eco writes “If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. Suppose Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism. In that case, I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and indeed a right-wing party, has now minimal connection to the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.”[2]

While Eco has several brilliant insights into Italian fascism, his work also has significant weaknesses. One of which was his blindness towards the betrayals of Italian Social Democracy. As Leon Trotsky points out, “ Italian fascism was the immediate outgrowth of the betrayal by the reformists of the Italian proletariat’s uprising. From the time the First World War ended, there was an upward trend in the revolutionary movement in Italy, and in September 1920, it resulted in the seizure of factories and industries by the workers. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a real fact; all that was lacking was to organise it and draw from it all the necessary conclusions. The social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void. The disruption of the revolutionary movement became the most critical factor in the growth of fascism. In September, the revolutionary advance came to a standstill, and November already witnessed the first significant demonstration of the fascists (the seizure of Bologna)[3]

Leon Trotsky was one of the first Marxists to not only define what exactly Italian fascism was, but also to warn of the danger it represented to the Italian and world working class. One of his earliest attempts to define fascism was in November 1931 when he wrote a letter to a friend titled “What is Fascism”. He wrote,

“The Fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders emerging from the ranks. It is a plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat and even to a certain extent, from the proletarian masses. Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement. The movement in Germany is primarily analogous to the Italian movement. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement.

The genuine basis is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it is a significant base, comprising the petty bourgeoisie of towns and cities, as well as the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for Fascism. In England, there is less of that base because the proletariat is the overwhelming majority of the population; the peasant or farming stratum is only a relatively insignificant section. It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., etc., can constitute such a base. However, this raises a new question that needs to be analysed. This is a supposition. It is necessary to explore just what it will be. It is essential to foresee the Fascist movement growing from this or that element. But this is only a perspective which is controlled by events. I am not affirming that it is impossible for a Fascist movement to develop in England or for a Mosley or someone else to become a dictator. This is a question for the future. It is a far-fetched possibility. To speak of it now as an imminent danger is not a prognosis but a mere prophecy. To be capable of foreseeing anything in the direction of Fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is Fascism? What is its base, its form and its characteristics? How will its development take place?”

This short volume, ‘How to Spot a Fascist,’ was republished in 2019 and is an essential contribution to understanding today’s fascist movement, led by Donald Trump. Eco was an insightful and compassionate writer, but he did not live to see the fascists come back. In the same year as Eco’s collection of essays, Christoph Vandrier’s book Why Are They Back was published by Mehring Books. As Vandrier’s recounts in the book after 81 years after the fall of the Third Reich, the neo-Nazi right has become a major political force in Germany. The book provides a valuable lesson in how to fight today’s fascists by learning the lessons of the past.

[1] Günter Grass and the Waffen SS-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/gras-m04.html

[2] Ur-Fascism Umberto Eco: June 22, 1995 The New York Review of Books  theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

[3] How Mussolini triumphed-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fascism-what-it-is-how-to-fight-it-leon-trotsky/02.html

Trotsky in Exile by Peter Weiss- Atheneum-Hardcover – 1 Jan. 1972

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Horatio, I am dead,

Thou livest, report me and my cause aright

To the unsatisfied.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2

“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression], protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be more easily exterminated.”

Leopold Trepper: The Great Game

One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.

“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.

The play is structured as a series of dialogues between Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries, including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.

Weiss’s portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual lives and experiences.

Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny in 1930.

In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born, Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961, Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”

Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage “Trotsky in Exile”.

As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the Soviet Union.

Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin, Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]

In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical. One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2] Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out

“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early 20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as the harbinger of capitalism’s demise.[3]

Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

According to a document entitled  The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe.

Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen, immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]

Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile. Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.

The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work and its author in the GDR.

To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible precision if my views are to make their way”[5]

Notes

1.   The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986, to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.

2.   Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

3.   Hanjo Kesting-The Writer’s Resistance (Peter Weiss) NLR I/139•May/June 1983

4.   The mechanism of revolution in the documentary theatre- Gideon Tsunami, The German Quarterly, November 1971, Vol 44 No 4

1

[1] The false friends of Peter Weiss, German dramatist, filmmaker and novelist-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/20/pete-o20.html

[2] See Mandel’s review of Weiss’s Book http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1971/xx/exile.htm

[3] The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html

[4] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/48.html

[5] 2.Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968

Lost Boys by James Bloodworth (Atlantic Books, £14.99).

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‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,’

 Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

“A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not help with all its might and all the means at its disposal- if it does not help women, twofold and threefold enslaved in the past, to get on the road of individual and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name if it does not take the greatest possible care of the children … for whose benefit it has been made. But how can one create … a new life based on mutual consideration, on self-respect, on the real equality of women . . . on the efficient care for children-in an atmosphere poisoned with the roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of enslavers and enslaved people, that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle against ‘foul language’ is an essential condition of mental hygiene just as the fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical hygiene.”

― Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life & Other Writings on Culture & Science

“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

Rosa Luxemburg

Lost Boys by James Bloodworth is a journalist’s examination of the reactionary movement that has been somewhat lightly termed the Manosphere. The Manosphere quaintly refers to a motley collection of websites, blogs and online forums promoting misogyny, masculinity and opposition to feminism. It promotes racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, climate change denial, homophobia and transphobia. This movement has become a recruitment centre and training ground for what can only be termed trainee fascists.

It is not surprising that Bloodworth did not want to research and write this book. He replied to his editor, saying, “Why would I want to do that?”. He writes, “Today I feel a bit like a funeral director in the aftermath of a mass casualty event. I would have preferred things to have turned out differently, but considering they haven’t, I intend to put my knowledge to some practical use. Having spent so much time researching the manosphere – including interviewing and interacting with hundreds of men and spending months at a time embedded on a course which purportedly taught men how to become ‘high status alpha males’ – I feel as if I have something worthwhile to contribute.”[1]

Indeed, why should anyone want to associate and talk to a bunch of Nazi like scumbags who give two thousand pounds to learn how to hunt down woman and on some occasions rape them and then brag about their behaviour of social media.

The origins of this so-called pickup movement can be traced back to Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller, The Game. His book turned the art of seduction into a woman hunt, which sees women as nothing more than prey and being treated as such. The men within this movement have no comprehension of history but their attitude towards women would not look out of place in the Nazi Party of German fascism.

To his credit, Bloodworth exposes these trainee fascists. He reveals the close links between the manosphere and the far Right, including fascists like Donald Trump. Trump’s fascist partners in the While House who dismiss their enemies as “beta”. His vice-president, JD Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. As Bloodworth points out, the rise of the Anti-feminist backlash coincided with the growth of fascist forces worldwide, and it reminded him of Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here, which enjoyed a resurgence during the first Trump presidency. As Sinclair wrote, ” Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’  However, his political understanding of how and why these members of the lumpen proletariat and deranged petty bourgeois are cannon fodder for a fascist movement is limited.

Bloodworth’s new book was inspired by his watching of the Netflix series Adolescence. He writes, “It is a striking film that is masterfully shot and powerfully acted. It has also generated a worthwhile public conversation. Much of this conversation has been constructive; however, some of it has been animated by a desire to change the subject – to talk about anything but misogyny and the radicalisation of young men on the internet. I found Adolescence surreal to watch at times.”[2]

As Thomas Scripps writes in his review of the Netflix series, “The reality, as we have been shown, is that the problems are well beyond an individual family’s ability to resolve. Perhaps the most common expression throughout the series is “I don’t know”, or some variant, from kids and adults alike; they are buffeted and bewildered by forces beyond their grasp.

The role of smartphones, the Internet, and social media, in particular, is well-contextualised in this broader social landscape. It would be foolish to deny the role they play in creating an unprecedented level of exposure to peer pressures and corporate advertising, declared and undeclared, and in streamlining the passage of individuals damaged by these influences into darker waters. But the real problem is the poison spilling out of a rotting social system—from misogynist ideologies to the glorification of violence, wealth and selfishness—for which these technologies are a conduit, and the conditions of social neglect which make young people emotionally susceptible: the most vulnerable dangerously so. Conditions which also hinder the social dialogue necessary to help children learn how to interact healthily with new technologies and form genuine relationships.”[3]

So far, the opposition to the rise of the “Manosphere has not come from working-class women, but has taken the form of the middle-class movement centred around the #MeToo movement, which is already eight years old. As the Marxist writer David Walsh wrote, “The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign’s “progressive” claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other significant social and political issues of the day.”[4]

One of the more outspoken and articulate critiques of the “Manosphere has come from the pen of the writer Amia Srinivasan. Her book The Right To sex,[5] while containing so worthwhile observations, it essentially promotes the #MeToo movement’s right to unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process.

Srinivasan is the darling of all the radical groups, who fall over themselves in promoting her idea of social justice.  Her brand of modern-day feminism is dominated mainly by selfish, upper-middle-class champions of “women’s rights”. Srinivasan writes, “It’s essential in any radical political tradition. It’s no surprise that utopian writing always has these wacky ideas. I mean, think about More’s Utopia, full of these strange possibilities, because the same political imagination that leads to the disclosure of new possible social arrangements also sometimes generates some crazy shit. The broadening of the sense of what’s possible, as well as what’s delightful about human life, has to be central to a radical politics.

As Kate Randall points out, “ The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle, not in the rarified atmosphere of the corporate boardroom and Hollywood. As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”

Notes

James Bloodworth is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in numerous British newspapers, as well as in many US publications. His book Hired: Undercover in Low Wage Britain was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2019 and was selected as The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year in 2018. He has produced and presented documentaries for Channel 4 television and has appeared on many podcasts. He has a new book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, scheduled for release on June 5, 2025, the result of a five-year investigation into the subculture.

[1] Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/

[2] ‘Adolescence’ and the Marketisation of Childhood, by James Bloodworth – 4 April 2025-https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/bloodworth-adolescence/

[3] Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/24/fbxd-m24.html

[4] One year of the #MeToo movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/19/year-o19.html

[5] The Right to Sex: Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022 Hardcover – 19 Aug. 2021-Bloomsbury

Diary of a Nobody

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In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website.

This year, I hope to expand the website and add more history writers, as well as a few additional subject pages. The other aim is to produce two drafts of the books I have been working on for some time. A collection of essays on Raphael Samuel and to rewrite my degree dissertation on Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates.

Meetings

If any writer has a meeting or book launch coming up, please don’t hesitate to contact me to advertise it.

Book Launch – A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition-

Author James Crossley introduces his biography of the Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history.

Thursday, 26 June 2025 – 7:00 pm Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU

National Portrait Gallery The Fiery Spirits: John Rees 10 July 2025, 13.00-14.00

Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution

Books Purchased

1.   The Nazi Mind-Laurence Rees

2.   The Last Days of Kira Mullan- N Ricci

3.   Oliver Cromwell-R Hutton

4.   Did It Happen Here- D Jenkins

5.   Hiroshima-J Hersey

6.   Anne Frank-The: The Diary of a Young Girl

7.   The Many Lives of Anne Frank-R Franklin

8.   Marxist Modernism-G Rose

9.   Mafalda-Isabella Cosse

10.Mafalda Quinto 2025

11.America’s Fatal Leap-Paul W Schroder

12.Reform, Revolution and Opportunism M Taber

13.The Time of the Harvest Has Come M Empson

14.Billie Holiday The Lady Sings the Blues

15.Lost Boys-James Bloodworth.

A Rebel’s Guide to Malcolm X by Antony Hamilton, Paperback – 29 Sept. 2016, Bookmarks Publication

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“The notion was expressed that the British government would not, out of its free will, ‘donate’ self-rule to a colony and that the application of some element of force might be necessary.”

FR Kankam-Boadu

“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom.”

WEB Du Bois

“Every Negro who lays claim to leadership should make a study of Bolshevism and explain its meaning to the coloured masses. It is the greatest and most scientific idea afloat in the world today that can be easily put into practice by the proletariat to better its material and spiritual life. Bolshevism…has made Russia safe for the Jew. It has liberated the Slav peasant from the priest and bureaucrat who can no longer egg him on to murder Jews to bolster up their rotten institutions. It might make these United States safe for the Negro…if the Russian idea should take hold of the white masses of the Western world, and they should rise in united strength and overthrow their imperial capitalist government, then the black toilers would automatically be free!”

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally, what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes. I replied with the best knowledge and information at my command. Then Trotsky expressed his own opinion about Negroes, which was more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders…he was not quick to make deductions about the causes of white prejudice against black. Indeed, he made no conclusions at all, and, happily, expressed no mawkish sentimentality about black and white brotherhood. What he said was very practical…he urged that Negroes should be educated about the labour movement…he said he would like to set a practical example in his own department and proposed the training of a group of Negroes as officers in the Red Army.

Claude McKay (1890-1948)

A Rebel’s Guide to Malcolm X is further confirmation, if it was already needed, of the British Socialist Worker’s Party’s promotion of racialist identity politics. This small book largely whitewashes, if you pardon the pun, Malcom X’s pursuit of black nationalist politics and support for racial segregation.

Hamilton’s book and the party he belongs to have historically adapted to the reformist middle-class leadership of the international civil rights movement. The SWP presents black nationalism, along with other forms of petty-bourgeois nationalism such as Castroism in Cuba, as complementary to the fight for socialism.

This small book begins by granting political amnesty to Garveyism.[1] The SWP in all their articles on Garvey contain mild criticisms of him, but on the whole, they gave him a free pass, saying, “In the end, he is remembered for giving a sense of pride to black people in the face of the hideous racism of the 1920s. That is worth recalling, and his faults should be seen in that context.”[2]

But as the Trotskyist Lawrence Porter points out “Despite his radical aura, Garvey rejected socialism. Indeed, he steadfastly opposed the struggle for equality even among blacks. As time progressed, the left rhetoric receded and the right-wing essence of Garvey’s politics came to the fore. By the 1920s, he found himself in cooperation with Jim Crow politicians and the Ku Klux Klan, who agreed with black nationalism’s policy of racial separatism. By the end of his life, Garvey boasted he was a fascist.”[3]

The other organisation given a free pass by Hamilton and the SWP is the American Communist Party. Malcolm X was never a member of the Communist Party or even close to it. So it is a little confusing that while he was in prison, his correspondence was opened and intercepted by the FBI. In this letter, Malcom X clearly states he is a Communist.

Under the heading of “Communist Party Activities”, the heavily redacted FBI transcription of letters from Malcolm X while in prison noted:

“Several excerpts from letters written by the subject. [redaction’] these excerpts were not quotes but rather notes jotted down [redaction] on the contents of these letters. On June 29, 1950, the Subject mailed a letter from which [redacted] copied the following: ‘Tell [redaction] to get in shape. It looks like another war. I have always been a Communist. I have tried to enlist in the Japanese Army during the last war, but now they will never draft or accept me in the U.S. Army. Everyone has always said [redaction] Malcolm is crazy, so it isn’t hard to convince people that I am.”[4]

The free pass given to the Stalinists in the American Communist Party reflects their attitude towards the American Trotskyist movement and Leon Trotsky. Neither is mentioned in the book. For an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, the SWP and Hamilton do not discuss the attitude of Leon Trotsky and the American Trotskyist Party towards Black Nationalism at any point. There is not enough room in this short review to include Trotsky’s discussion with the American comrades on black nationalism, which should be considered in any discussion of Malcolm X.

Trotsky wrote:

“The point of view of the American comrades appears to me not fully convincing. ‘Self-determination’ is a democratic demand. Our American comrades advance as against this democratic demand, the liberal demand. This liberal demand is, moreover, complicated. I understand what ‘political equality’ means. But what is the meaning of economic and social equality within a capitalist society? Does that mean a demand to public opinion that all enjoy equal protection under the law? But that is political equality. The slogan ‘political, economic and social equality’ sounds equivocal, and while it is not clear to me, it nevertheless suggests itself easily to misinterpretation.

The Negroes are a race and not a nation:—Nations grow out of the racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of building a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But while they are there under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America.

We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation; if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for. We say: If the Negroes want that then we must fight against imperialism to the last drop of blood, so that they gain the right, wherever and how they please, to separate a piece of land for themselves. The fact that they are not a majority in any state today is irrelevant. It is not a question of the authority of the states but of the Negroes. That in the overwhelming Negro territory also whites have existed. They will remain henceforth is not the question and we do not need today to break our heads over a possibility that sometime the whites will be suppressed by the Negroes. In any case the suppression of the Negroes pushes them toward a political and national unity.

That the slogan ‘self-determination’ will rather win the petty bourgeois instead of the workers—that argument holds good also for the slogan of equality. It is clear that the special Negro elements who appear more frequently in the public eye (businessmen, intellectuals, lawyers, etc.) are more active and react more strongly against inequality. It is possible to say that the liberal demand, just as well as the democratic one, in the first instance will attract the petty bourgeois and only later the workers.”[5]

In a lecture delivered at the Socialist Equality Party (US) summer school, held August 1 through August 6, 2021, Niles Niemuth, a writer for the World Socialist Web Site, made the following point. “Trotsky was seeking in brief discussions with American members in Turkey in 1933 and Mexico in 1939 to correct the American Trotskyists’ neglect of the “Negro question,” orient the party to a critical section of the American working class and facilitate the recruitment of worker members under conditions where the twists and turns of the Communist Party had alienated many black intellectuals and workers who had been drawn to Marxism over the previous two decades.” I don’t know if even the Trotskyists in the American section of the Fourth International would have been able to change Malcolm X’s subsequent political trajectory. Still, the ensuing political discussion with Malcolm X would have educated a much larger audience and clarified the question of Black nationalism.[6]

Section four of the book elaborates on Malcolm X’s time in prison and his life in the Nation of Islam. While in prison, Malcolm X read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Orlando Reade[7] In an interview with the SWP, Reade said :

“Malcolm X read Paradise Lost in the late 1940s when he was a young man serving a long sentence for burglary. He had this desire to read, combined with a deep suspicion of white writers. Malcolm X was trying to bend the literature to make it serve his new radical viewpoint. When he came to Paradise Lost, Malcolm also perceived something true. Milton compared Satan on his way to Eden to European ships on their way to satisfy their appetite for sugar, spice and tobacco. Malcolm saw how Milton associated Satan with European kings and their armies, as well as the colonisers. Malcolm found something profoundly radical in Milton’s critique of worldly power. He found in Paradise Lost a critique of white supremacy.”[8]

In the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine, an article on the women in Malcom X’s life shows they were instrumental in his turn towards the politics of the Nation of Islam. [9]The NOI was not a threat to capitalism in the United States, nor was Malcolm X, as long as he was in it. But as David Walsh points out, it was only after breaking with the organisation that his life became endangered. Walsh writes :

“The assassinations of Malcolm X and, some three years later, of Martin Luther King Jr., could not have been accidental in their purpose or their timing. When Malcolm represented the Nation of Islam, his life was not threatened. Still, when he broke from Elijah Muhammad’s anti-white separatism and suggested, even in a limited way, that race was not the fundamental dividing line in the fight against injustice, he became a marked man. His newly formed Organisation of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) was undoubtedly quickly infiltrated by agents and provocateurs. At the same time, full advantage was taken of the threats made against him by the Nation of Islam. All the cops had to do was sabotage Malcolm X’s security and look the other way.”[10]

As I mentioned at the beginning, the SWP adapted to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, it continues to maintain its stance in support of Black nationalism. How else would you understand the SWP’s Ruby Hirsch’s fawning article over the recent Super Bowl performance of Beyonce’s “ in which her dancers dressed in the black berets and raised gloved fists of the Black Panthers and stood in an “X” formation, was broadcast to more than 100 million Americans. It was a powerful tribute to Malcolm X and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The reality of the Black Lives Matter Movement is somewhat different from the one described by the British SWP. As Lawrence Porter and Nancy Hanover write, “From the beginning, the ‘mothers of the movement’ Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi—who collectively adopted the famous hashtag—specifically opposed uniting blacks, whites and immigrants against the brutal class-war policies of the capitalist state. Instead, the group did its best to confine anti-police violence protests within the framework of the capitalist system and push a racialist and pro-capitalist agenda.”[11]

Malcolm X was a complex man. Who knows if he had not been assassinated, whether he would have moved further to the left and rejected his brand of black nationalism and taken up a struggle against black and white capitalism. To be blunt, Hamilton’s book is a whitewash of Malcom X’s history and politics and does nothing to clarify today’s issue of black nationalism or racism.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey

[2] Marcus Garvey: a liberating legacy of challenging racism-socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/marcus-garvey-a-liberating-legacy-of-challenging-racism/

[3] Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/02/qhdd-m02.html

[4] www.blackagendareport.com/malcolm-x-black-nationalism-and-cold-war

[5] On Black Nationalism-Documents on the Negro Struggle http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm

[6] Race, class and social conflict in the United States. wsws.org

[7] What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost, 2024, Jonathan Cape.

[8] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/

[9] www.historyextra.com/magazine/current-issue-bbc-history-magazine/

[10] Two men convicted in 1965 Malcolm X assassination exonerated in New York court-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/19/malc-n19.html

[11]  Black Lives Matter cashes in on black capitalism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/04/blm-a04.html 

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024.

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“Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements.”

Richard Seymour

“Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”

Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

“In the meantime, the first characteristic of a revolutionary party is- to be able to look reality in the face.”

 Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It

“If we place events in this more historically comprehensive context, it is clear that January 6 marks a new stage in a protracted process of democratic breakdown. We have witnessed in recent days efforts by historians and journalists to claim that really nothing of great importance happened on January 6, and that everything will more or less return to normal. This dangerous underestimation of the danger is based not merely on an incorrect evaluation of American conditions.”

David North.

While it is usually not possible to tell a book by its cover, you can usually gauge a book by its first page. Probably the greatest example of this is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which is arguably the most stunning introduction to a book in modern literature. The same cannot be said about Richard Seymour’s first page.

The quote from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps fitting, given that Seymour is not a Marxist but a pseudo-leftist, and both Adorno and Horkheimer were anti-Marxists.

As Peter Schwarz says, “The first thing that comes to mind when reading ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is the complete absence of any reference to concrete historical, economic or political events, social classes, political parties or questions of perspective. Neither the policies of the Social Democrats nor those of the Communist Party are examined. Not even Hitler is mentioned. Instead, everything is treated at the level of pure thought, which is presented as an independent subject, completely detached from thinking individuals, social consciousness, the struggle of classes and the struggle of ideas. Horkheimer and Adorno describe this as “thought … reflecting on its own guilt.”[1]

Seymour does examine in a limited manner concrete historical, economic and political events, which is not the problem; however, he does so not from the perspective of a Marxist but from that of a radical leftist. In Richard Seymour’s book, Trump is not a fascist but another far-right leader who is peddling a non-Marxist term called “Disaster Nationalism”.

There are many sides to a Marxist, and one of those sides is clarity of thought and action. Arguably, the greatest Marxist thinker of the 20th century, apart from Vladimir Lenin and the modern-day Trotskyist David North, was Leon Trotsky. You would have thought that if someone was looking to understand modern fascism and be given a book contract to do so, you would consult the most brilliant authority on the subject, and that is Trotsky. Yet in Seymour’s book, Trotsky warrants one tiny mention with no quotes from his major works on German and Italian fascism.

This is Trotsky’s approach: “What is fascism? The name originated in Italy. Were all the forms of counter-revolutionary dictatorship fascist or not (That is to say, before the advent of fascism in Italy)? The former dictatorship in Spain of Primo de Rivera, 1923–30, is called a fascist dictatorship by the Comintern. Is this correct or not? We believe that it is incorrect. The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses, with new leaders from the rank and file. It is a plebian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses; Mussolini, a former socialist, is a “self-made” man arising from this movement.

Primo de Rivera was an aristocrat. He occupied a high military and bureaucratic post and was chief governor of Catalonia. he accomplished his overthrow with the aid of state and military forces. The dictatorships of Spain and Italy are two different forms of dictatorship. It is necessary to distinguish between them. Mussolini had difficulty in reconciling many old military institutions with the fascist militia.

This problem did not exist for Primo de Rivera. The movement in Germany is analogous mostly to the Italian. It is a mass movement, with its leaders employing a great deal of socialist demagogy. This is necessary for the creation of the mass movement. The genuine basis (for fascism) is the petty bourgeoisie. In Italy, it has a very large base – the petty bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, and the peasantry. In Germany, likewise, there is a large base for fascism. It may be said, and this is true to a certain extent, that the new middle class, the functionaries of the state, the private administrators, etc., can constitute such a base. But this is a new question that must be analysed. To be capable of foreseeing anything about fascism, it is necessary to have a definition of that idea. What is fascism? What are its base, its form, and its characteristics? How will its development take place? It is necessary to proceed in a scientific and Marxian manner.”[2]

Seymour does not proceed in a scientific or Marxist manner. If he did, he would behave like any decent historian or writer and examine the only orthodox or classical Marxist movement on the planet, which is represented by the Marxists who write for the World Socialist Website. They have written extensively on the rise of modern fascism. It suffices to say that Seymour did not contact them or quote their analysis.

Their analysis of the rise of Trump and his brand of American fascism cuts across Seymour’s pseudo-left perspective, which is to downplay the rise of world fascism. Marxist writer Joseph Kishore believes that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. Trump’s rise and return to power are not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”

While it is one thing to describe Trump and his gang as fascists, it is another to set his dictatorship in the same context as the rise of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. David North, the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in his introductory remarks to the post-election online webinar “The Election Debacle and the Fight Against Dictatorship,” cautions:

“ Now, it is not the position of the SEP and the WSWS that the accession of Trump to the presidency is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1933 victory. The United States is not Weimar Germany, and the transformation of the United States into a police state dictatorship backed by a mass fascist movement will not, whatever Trump’s intentions, be achieved overnight.  But it would be politically irresponsible, and contribute to the success of Trump’s aims, not to recognise the dangerous implications and real consequences of last Tuesday’s election. At the very least, it is necessary to take Trump at his word.[3]

Which Seymour does not. He is not alone in underplaying the dangers of the rise of fascism in America. Alan Woods, leader of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), the successor to the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), published an article that starkly illustrates the complacent and anti-Marxist orientation of his and other political tendencies. Revealingly titled “Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment,” the article echoes Trump’s fraudulent claims of being an anti-establishment figure while downplaying the immense dangers posed by a Trump presidency to the working class.

Woods writes, “The ruling class of America – firmly supported by the governments of Europe – was determined to keep him [Trump] out of office, by fair means or foul. After Trump was ousted in the 2020 election, everything was done to prevent him from running again… All the numerous attacks against him rebounded and turned against those who were seen, correctly, as being involved in a conspiracy to prevent him from re-entering the White House.[4]

The World Socialist Website opposed Wood’s complacency, writing, “This portrayal is false. The ruling class was not ‘determined to keep [Trump] out of office.” Significant sections of the financial and corporate elite, including billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, actively supported Trump, viewing his authoritarian and pro-business agenda as a means of furthering their class interests. Others, like Jeff Bezos, have proclaimed their support for Trump after the election.” The article went on to reiterate its position that Trump and his allies were not fascists.

Seymour, like many of his pseudo-left fellow travellers, downplayed the 2006 coup attempt by Trump and his supporters in his latest book. In his article “Myths about the January 6th Capitol Building Events,” written by Roger D. Harris, a member of California’s Peace and Freedom Party, joins Seymour in his criminal underplaying of the coup attempt. Harris writes, “The riot was no attempted coup; it was just a sitting president unprecedentedly calling a march on the Capitol… signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. What did happen is that a sitting president unprecedentedly called for a march on the Capitol to contest an election, signifying a breakdown of bourgeois political norms. Quite unlike Al Gore, who took a hit for elite political stability rather than contest the 2000 presidential election, Trump flagrantly broke the rules of orderly succession.”[5]

There is a degree of confusion, complacency, and even a hint of deception in Seymour’s analysis; when he writes, “ Disaster nationalism is not fascist. These movements do not seek to overthrow electoral democracy. Except for the RSS in India – the grass-roots cadre organisation supporting Modi’s BJP – they do not command far-right, paramilitary mass movements. The fascism that is being prepared through this sequence will not resemble classical fascism. The world that made fascism — colonialism, class civil war, revolution, and intense industrial modernisation-has passed. The new world is one in which the big questions will be those raised by the climate crisis: who gets what and who does without, who lives and who dies. Neonate fascism, whether green or brown, is preparing the terrain for a war on what it sees as mutant or out-of-place biology: the migratory or criminal.”[6]

Analogies with the past are fraught with danger, especially when examining the rise of fascism. Yet, the past can serve as a guide for today. Crucial to understanding the rise of fascism today is a systematic study of the past, especially the work of Leon Trotsky.  As Trotsky writes: “German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital. Mussolini is right: the middle classes are incapable of independent policies. During periods of great crisis, they are called upon to reduce to absurdity the policies of one of the two basic classes. Fascism succeeded in putting them at the service of capital.

 “Trotsky’s understanding of fascism can be used to understand today’s fascism. Seymour’s reluctance to study or utilise Trotsky’s work on fascism stems from his political views, which are a mishmash of liberal, Stalinist, and reformist traditions. Seymour joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1998 and fully immersed himself in their anti-Trotskyism. Pseudo-leftists Mike Kidron and Chris Harman, for economics; Alex Callinicos, for political philosophy; and Tony Cliff, for the weltanschauung, were his heroes. A second layer of influence was the ‘political Marxists,’ including Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner, and thirdly, Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham School. Is it  any wonder Seymour is completely vague and indelicate regarding the rise of fascism in America

As the Marxist George Lavan Weissman wrote:  “An indiscriminate use of the term (fascism)reflects vagueness about its meaning.” Asked to define fascism, the liberal replies in such terms as dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, etc. Impressionism and confusion among liberals are not surprising. However, Marxism’s superiority lies in its ability to analyse and differentiate among social and political phenomena. That so many of those calling themselves Marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic (reformist socialist) and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory. These movements not only permitted Nazism to come to power in Germany without a shot being fired against it, but they failed abysmally in understanding the nature and dynamics of fascism and the way to fight it. After fascism’s triumphs, they had much to hide and therefore refrained from making a Marxist analysis, which would, at the very least, have educated subsequent generations.[7]

This book lacks merit and should not have been allowed past the editorial stage by Verso. The fact that the Pabloites at Verso share Seymour’s politics should not come as a surprise. If the Scribes at Verso wanted to understand the rise of global fascism, they could have at least reprinted some of Leon Trotsky’s works. We wait with bated breath for this to happen.

[1] The rise of fascism in Germany and the collapse of the Communist Internationaw.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/10/le9-all.html

[2] Extracts from a letter to an English comrade, November 15, 1931;

printed in The Militant, January 16, 1932-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p1

[3] www.wsws.org

[4] Trump victory: a kick in the teeth for the establishment-https://marxist.com/trump-victory-2024.htm

[5] Popular Myths about the January 6th Capitol Building Events-mltoday.com/popular-myths-about-the-january-6th-capitol-building-events/

[6] www.newstatesman.com/politics/2020/03/rise-disaster-nationalism-why-authoritarian-right-resurgent

[7] What It Is and How To Fight It-Leon Trotsky-1969 Pamphlet Introduction-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition (Palgrave Studies in Utopianism) by James Crossley 22 Jan. 2025

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I think that the celebration of 1640—and especially of 1649—did something for the Party in giving it confidence in a non-gradualist tradition to an extent that it is difficult for the younger generation perhaps to realise.

Christopher Hill

“Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.”

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

This is the first book-length semi-biography of the Stalinist intellectual A. L. Morton (1903–1987). It follows hot on the heels of biographies of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (ANU Lives Series in Biography) by Sophie Scott-Brown, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Sir Richard J. Evans, and, recently, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick. All four were members of the Communist Party Historians Group.

It is striking that Palgrave has Morton as a pioneer of the study of Utopianism rather than Marxism. Indeed, Morton was pretty much a pioneer of utopianism, radical history, and English national identity. However, he is best known for his works A People’s History of England (1938) and The English Utopia (1952). Crossley’s book is extensively researched, making use of Morton’s archive held at the Marx Memorial Library in London. His book includes archival work carried out at The National Archives of recently released secret service files.

It is undisputed that Morton was one of the most important influences on a whole generation of historians, both inside and outside the Communist Party. As Eric Hobsbawm relates:

“Our achievements were not insignificant. First, there is little doubt that the rise of ‘social history’ in Britain as a field of study, and especially of ‘history from below’ or the ‘history of the common people’, owes a great deal to the work of the members of the group (e.g. Hilton, Hill, Rude, E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel). In particular, the serious concern with plebeian ideology—the theory underlying the actions of social movements—is still largely identified with historians of this provenance, for the social history of ideas was always (thanks largely to Hill) one of our main preoccupations. Second, the members of the group contributed very substantially to the development of labour history.

Third, the study of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was largely transformed by us; and though this is largely due to Hill’s ‘dominant position in the field of Revolutionary studies today’, Hill himself would be the first to agree that the debates among Marxist historians on the Revolution and his work, from 1940 onwards, played a part in the development of his views. The historiography of the English Revolution today is by no means predominantly Marxist; on the other hand, but for the Marxists, it would certainly be very different. Fourth, members of the group have influenced the general teaching of history through the often very popular general textbooks which they have written, as well as through other works. In this respect, A. L. Morton pioneered the way with his People’s History, which still remains the only Marxist attempt to write the entire history of Britain (or rather England). Fifth, the journal founded in the worst days of the Cold War by a group of Marxist historians, Past & Present, has become one of the leading historical journals in the world. Though it was never Marxist in the literal sense, and even dropped its sub-title ‘a journal of scientific history’ in 1958, the initiative, and to some extent the general stance of the journal, originally came from the Marxists, and their contribution to it was therefore crucial, at least in the early years when it established its standing. These are not negligible achievements. They justify recalling the ten fruitful years which began with Leslie Morton’s desire to consult other Marxist historians for the second edition of his People’s History. At all events, if no one else reads this memoir with interest or profit, one thing is certain: it will recall a part of their past to the middle-aged and ageing survivors of the Historians’ Group of 1946-56, wherever their paths have since taken them. [1]

As Crossly writes, “A People’s History of England is probably the first Marxist history of the nation. It explains the transformation from ancient forms of societies through the rise and fall of feudalism and on to capitalism, the rise of the working class, and the potential for a new era of socialism. For Morton, these transformations in England were the product of competing class interests and technological advances. The book stood in stark contrast to the usual histories of the nation, focused on its supposed great individuals.”[2]

Morton’s book is well written and not without merit. Crossley is correct when he says that Morton’s work was guided by the political needs of the Communist Party’s popular front campaign. But for too long, this work has been labelled Marxist. As this quote from Raphael Samuel shows, it is not a historical materialist approach but borders on mysticism at times:

“This version of people’s history invoked the authority of Marx, but it borrowed freely from the positivist sociology of Spencer and Comte as well as, in another direction, from Darwinian biology. Folk-life studies in this period were conducted in the same spirit, using the comparative method to situate myths in an evolutionary grid. The deterministic vision is no less apparent in the ‘folk psychology’ of Wundt – a kind of historical ethnography of mental characteristics and in those various theories of mass behaviour which make the individual a compulsive creature of instinct. The most deterministic history of all was that of human geography, which explained the character of peoples by reference to geography, climate, and soil.”[3]

Or to put it more precisely as Ann Talbot does “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 rary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.”[4]

Crossley is correct to point out Morton’s gifts and range of subjects. However, like other members of the CPHG, there were two subjects that he could not write about: one was the Russian Revolution, and the other was the rise of Stalin. A discussion on the work of the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was also taboo. As Ann Talbot points out

“ There is something Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem to have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.”[5]

Eric Hobsbawm justified their actions saying, “There are several reasons why, by and large, our work as historians did not suffer more from the contemporary dogmatism. First, it must always be remembered that even during the most dogmatic Stalinist period, the authorised versions of Marxist history were concerned with genuine historical problems, and arguable as serious history, except where the political authority of the Bolshevik Party and similar matters were involved. While this patently made it a waste of time to debate, say, the history of the Soviet Union—except to discover new citations with which to embellish official truth—it left substantial scope for genuine analysis over the greater part of the human past. Indeed, the debates of Soviet historians could be reasonably integrated into such a discussion, and the work of some of them which survived from earlier periods (such as that of E. A. Kosminsky on feudal England) or was published during these years (such as B. F. Porshnev’s study of popular risings in France) was respected and influential outside Marxist circles, even when not accepted. Moreover, communist intellectuals were encouraged (if they needed any encouragement) to study the texts of Marx and Engels as well as of Lenin and Stalin; nor was there (according to Stalin himself) an obligation to accept all of them as literal truth. In brief, the received orthodoxy both of historical materialism and of historical interpretation was not, except for some specific topics mainly concerning the twentieth century, incompatible with genuine historical work. “[6] David North wrote a reply about Hobsbawm’s craven capitulation, writing:

The Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for Professor Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his politics. Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB, he had 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. Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled him to tell lies is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer. It would have been best for him, and no loss to the writing of history, had he continued to limit himself to events before 1900.”[7]

Despite Morton’s criticism of what he called “naïve utopianism” in his book The English Utopia (1952), Morton was guilty of idealism and could easily be described by Marx if he were alive today as a Utopian Socialist, not a Marxist. The English Utopia (1952) traces what Morton believes was an unbroken thread of radicalism. The book charted the history of utopian thinking and utopian literature about peasant hopes, the rise of bourgeois thought, and the emergence of socialism. Just like his book A People’s History, Morton’s book on Utopia continued the CP’s popular front politics and supported the CP’s reformist British Road to Socialism. Morton saw the CP as the inheritors of English radicalism. Morton also wrote the book to counteract what he saw as an attack on England’s pure radical tradition from what he termed US Imperialism’s interference in British history. Crossley writes:

“Morton’s criticisms of American imperialism were sharp and unambiguous, and that they turn up in the final editing of The English Utopia meant that Morton wanted them to be taken seriously. Indeed, we should see such criticisms as part of the heightening of CPGB criticisms of American imperialism and accompanying cultural dominance (e.g., through cinema, comics, books, philosophy) as Morton was finishing off the book.4 In April 1951, the National Cultural Committee of the CPGB ran a conference on the American threat to British culture, with the proceedings published in a special edition of Arena. As well as attacking the malign influence of American culture, an accompanying emphasis in this era was to promote English and British cultural traditions, radical or otherwise. The work of the Communist Party Historians’ Group was tied up with this agenda, not least with its sharp focus on English and British history. In his role as chair of the Historians’ Group, Rodney Hilton wrote in support of the Cultural Committee. He suggested that the culture of the ruling class was in “utter decay” and dependent on the “American imperialists”. He likewise embraced the task of exposing American bourgeois culture while promoting a progressive patriotism to oust the “bastard patriotism” of the ruling class.”[8]

To a large degree, Morton has been largely forgotten by historians. While I am all for rescuing Historians from what E. P Thompson called “The Condescension of Posterity”, I am not sure we desperately need to reclaim Morton’s legacy as Crossley wants to. What is Morton’s legacy? He was undoubtedly a skilled historian, and most of his books are worth reading, but he was no Marxist. At best, he was a Utopian socialist and at worst, he was a Stalinist who stayed in the British Communist Party and slavishly supported and justified every betrayal.

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

[2]labourhub.org.uk/2025/04/02/remembering-a-l-morton-historian-of-english-radicalism/

[3] An edited excerpt from Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick

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

[5] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

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

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

[8] A. L. Morton’s English Utopia and the Critical Study of Apocalypticism and Millenarianism-by James Crossley- https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/14/11/1339