Tag: marxism

Hitler’s Private Library: Erudition Without Explanation

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Timothy Ryback’s book, “Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life” (2008), demonstrates comprehensive archival research. By examining around 1,200 surviving books from Hitler’s personal collection now kept at the Library of Congress and Brown University, Ryback carefully reconstructs Hitler’s reading patterns. He examines Hitler’s marginal notes, underlined passages, the books he frequently revisited at crucial moments, and the intellectual insights he gained through self-education. This approach offers a detailed portrait that challenges the stereotype of Hitler as merely an ignorant agitator, unaffected by ideas, whose political moves were driven solely by emotion and irrationality.

Ryback’s analysis indicates that Hitler was not an academic thinker but a selective reader driven mainly by ideology. He focused on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, drawn to their anti-democratic and social-Darwinist ideas, and also explored Chamberlain’s racial mysticism and Grant’s eugenics. Additionally, Hitler studied Fichte and Carlyle’s writings about Frederick the Great and regarded Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as a symbol of unwavering determination. Ryback’s detailed study of Hitler’s reading patterns, including pencil marks likely made by him, demonstrates how racial pseudoscience was disseminated through prominent German and American publications, influencing Nazi ideology.

Nevertheless, the book’s limitation highlights the broader challenges of using intellectual biography to explain large-scale political phenomena. Ryback treats the subject as if the main question about National Socialism is: What materials did Hitler read, and how did they shape “the man and his thinking”? The assumption here is that Hitler’s intellectual background can uncover the roots of the Third Reich. This idealist approach, however, ultimately leads Ryback into a conceptual dead end.

The Problem of Intellectual Causality

Hitler’s combination of racial pseudoscience, Social Darwinism, and Nietzschean vulgarisations was not unique; such ideas circulated widely within the völkisch subculture of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. They appeared in numerous pamphlets, journals, and popular histories read by tens of thousands who had no direct connection to the Chancellery. The intellectual environment Hitler drew from was well-known. It represented a broad ideological movement that echoed the fears of a shattered petty bourgeoisie, a class devastated by inflation, unemployment, and the disintegration of the old imperial system.

What needs clarification is not that a marginal, resentful autodidact studied this material. The real question is why German capitalism, during the depths of the Depression and confronted with an organised working class, elevated this specific figure and movement to the position of state power. Ryback’s method of translating key phrases and ideas from books into speeches risks mixing cause and effect by implying that political catastrophe originates from intellectual history. In the end, it reduces the Third Reich to a flawed bibliography. This echoes Trotsky’s early-1930s warning that German fascism was driven not only by ideas but also by a mass movement involving the disillusioned petty bourgeoisie. This group, despairing due to economic collapse and systemic failure, was mobilised and funded by finance capital as a weapon against the organised working class. Ideas alone do not explain fascism’s rise; it’s the class forces behind it that do.

Trotsky’s analysis of fascism is among the most insightful ever written. He argued that fascism should not be viewed merely as an ideological phenomenon or as the result of a single individual’s intellectual growth. Instead, he saw it as a social movement stemming from capitalism’s crisis. Its ideological elements—such as racial pseudoscience, nationalism, and anti-Marxism—were secondary to its primary social role: the dismantling of the workers’ movement. Trotsky identified three decisive factors.

The collapse of German capitalism weakened the petty bourgeoisie and increased support for reactionary forces. The German bourgeoisie notably financed the NSDAP to weaken the working class. Political failures of workers’ parties—especially the Social Democrats’ reformist stance, which linked the working class too closely to the Weimar government, and the Comintern’s damaging “social fascism” doctrine, which hindered the KPD from forming a united front with the SPD against the Nazis —played a crucial role in the crisis. These economic, political, and class factors ultimately led to Hitler’s rise. However, Ryback’s account omits these aspects, as they fall outside the book’s scope: the private reader and his shelves.

The narrative depicts Hitler’s intellectual growth as the key factor behind the Third Reich. However, this view is not only incomplete but also misleading. It echoes the “great man” theory of history, implying that one individual’s intellectual development can account for the political disaster.

The Völkisch Milieu: Ideas Without Power

Ryback’s book unintentionally shows the opposite of its aim. The ideas Hitler adopted — racial pseudoscience, eugenics, nationalist mythology — were common in the völkisch milieu, a broad ideological environment thriving in the late imperial and early Weimar eras. This environment fostered numerous pamphleteers, lecturers, and minor political figures who shared Hitler’s views but never gained widespread recognition. Why did Hitler succeed where they did not?

Ryback cannot fully answer this question because his approach overlooks key variables such as class forces, economic crises, and political leadership. Ideas alone do not clarify why Hitler ascended to Chancellor, why the German bourgeoisie favoured him over other reactionary options, or why the workers’ movement failed to prevent it. Although the völkisch environment produced many ideologues, only one served as monopoly capital’s instrument in its conflict with the working class.

Ryback’s book also flirts with a narrower, more literary critique. The attribution of marginalia remains uncertain, which Ryback’s reviewers have pointed out. Kirkus described the attempt to interpret Hitler’s pencil marks as “an uncertain and perhaps even pointless pursuit, since it’s not always clear who made the marks.” A history of ideas partly based on unverifiable annotations is less solid than its confident narrative suggests.

The issue isn’t that marginalia are without value—they can offer insight. However, if a book’s main argument relies heavily on pinpointing pencil marks in a dictator’s library, the evidence can become unstable. Intellectual biography naturally risks overanalysing, and Ryback’s book, despite its careful archival work, sometimes exceeds this boundary.

None of this is meant to dismiss the book’s importance. Ryback provides concrete evidence of how racial pseudoscience, spread through reputable German and American publications, influenced Nazi ideology. For example, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, an American publication praised and translated in Germany, illustrates this point. The historical lineage of these ideas, which Ryback traces, holds significant documentary value for historians of the period. However, fully understanding how such ideas came to dominate a modern industrial state’s policies must go beyond what was casually found on the dictator’s nightstand.

The text questions why the German bourgeoisie chose to hand over state power to those promoting certain ideas, despite the threat of proletarian revolution. It also asks why the leadership of the German workers’ movement failed to prevent this, why the petty bourgeoisie became the primary support for fascism, and why the Comintern undermined the united front at a critical moment. These questions revolve around class forces and political betrayal rather than literary influence. However, despite its scholarship, Ryback’s book does not address these questions.

Erudition Without Explanation

Hitler’s Private Library is a deeply scholarly work that meticulously reconstructs a dictator’s reading history with excellent archival detail. It illuminates the ideological fragments Hitler internalised and exploited. However, it falls short of explaining the rise of fascism, as its approach omits crucial factors such as the capitalist crisis, the bourgeoisie’s influence, and the failure of the workers’ movement.

The risk of intellectual biography is that it may confuse an individual’s intellectual growth with the driving forces of history. Ryback’s book, though valuable, succumbs to this error. It provides knowledge without context — presenting a portrait of Hitler but not illuminating the social forces that shaped his ideas into the doctrine of a modern industrial state.

 Notes

 Knopf, 2008; Random House reprint, 2010.

  • 278 pp. (Knopf edition) / 320 pp. (Random House reprint)
  • ISBN: 9781400042043 (2008); 9781409075783 (2010)
  • Contents include: Frontline Reading 1915, Mentor’s Trade, Hitler Trilogy, Lost Philosopher, Book Wars, Divine Inspiration, Frontline Reading 1940, Hitler’s History of the Second World War, Miracle Deferred, plus four archival appendices.

The Atlantic Monthly, May 2003.

  • Early version of Ryback’s research, based on work in the Library of Congress rare‑book room.
  • Describes the discovery of Hitler’s books in 1945 and their transfer to the Library of Congress in 1952.

🗄️ Archival Documentation

Ryback’s appendices reproduce or summarise key historical reports on Hitler’s library:

  • Frederick Oechsner, “This Is the Enemy” (1942) — wartime description of Hitler’s book collection.
  • US Army Twenty‑First Counterintelligence Corps Report (May 1945) — inventory of the Berghof book collection after its seizure.
  • Hans Beihack, “Library of a Dilettante” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9 Nov 1946) — an early postwar journalistic account.
  • Arnold J. Jacobius, “Report on the Adolph Hitler Collection” (Library of Congress, 9 Jan 1952) — cataloguing and recommendations after the books arrived in Washington.

These documents are essential for reconstructing provenance, dispersal, and authenticity of surviving volumes.

🏛️ Institutional Holdings

Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.)

Holds the largest surviving portion of Hitler’s library (approx. 1,200 volumes).

  • Discovered in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden in 1945.
  • Shipped to the U.S. and accessioned in 1952.

Brown University (John Hay Library)

Holds additional volumes acquired separately; Ryback consulted these during his research. (General bibliographic confirmation via Ryback’s book description.)

📖 Secondary Bibliographic Sources

Penn State Libraries: Bibliography of Library History

Entry for Hitler’s Private Library (2008) summarises publication details and appendices.

Google Books Bibliographic Record

Provides publication metadata, subject classification, and author biography for the 2010 edition.

🧭 Suggested Citation

Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York: Knopf, 2008. ———. Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. London: Random House, 2010.

Ryback, Timothy W. “Hitler’s Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books, and His Search for God.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 2003.

Oechsner, Frederick. “This Is the Enemy.” 1942.

Twenty‑First Counterintelligence Corps (U.S. Army). “Description of the Berghof Book Collection.” May 1945.

Beihack, Hans. “Library of a Dilettante.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 9, 1946.

Jacobius, Arnold J. “Report on the Adolph Hitler Collection and Recommendations Regarding Its Arrangement.” Library of Congress, January 9, 1952.

Claudia Jones, Stalinism, and the Origins of “Triple Oppression”: A Historical Assessment

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Claudia Jones’s 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” holds a unique and revealing position within the political context of the postwar American left. Modern academic circles often celebrate it as a cornerstone of “socialist feminism,” even as an early form of intersectional theory. However, when viewed in the context of the actual historical development of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the decline of the international communist movement under Stalin, the essay takes on a different perspective. It is not seen as a groundbreaking theoretical work but rather as a product of a party already aligned with the Kremlin’s interests, and its ideas presaged the later split of the working class into various identity-based factions.

This assessment aligns with the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), whose critique of Stalinism, the national question, and the pseudo-left’s adoption of identity politics is rooted in extensive political experience and theoretical development. While Jones’s essay offers valuable empirical insights from this viewpoint, it also reveals some significant political limitations.

Black Women and Superexploitation

Jones’s key empirical insight is undeniable. In the postwar U.S., Black women were the most exploited and marginalised segment of the working class. Mostly limited to domestic work and the lowest-paid industrial roles, they faced extreme Superexploitation, which the labour movement and even the CPUSA had failed to address effectively. Jones’s argument that racism and sexism are not just social issues but fundamental manifestations of capitalist relations provided a valuable correction to the complacency and opportunism that had infiltrated the Party’s own ranks.

A Marxist view endorses this stance, highlighting that combating racism and sexism is fundamentally connected to class conflict. The workers’ movement must stand up for its most marginalised members to advance. Jones’s critique of Black women’s exclusion within the left was therefore valid and necessary. Nonetheless, while her empirical evidence is persuasive, it does not fully address the shortcomings of her theoretical approach.

By 1949, the CPUSA was no longer a revolutionary organisation. After the Popular Front, Earl Browder’s wartime policy of class collaboration, and his “no-strike” pledge, the party shifted back to the “left” under the influence of Kremlin diplomacy rather than grassroots needs. Jones’s essay reflects this transitional period, serving more as an internal correction aimed at aligning the Party’s mass efforts with Moscow’s new postwar “left” stance. Its political scope is confined within the Stalinist framework in which it was produced.

This is most apparent in its unquestioning backing of the CPUSA as the primary force for Black women’s liberation. By 1949, the Party was already weakened due to McCarthyite repression and internal bureaucratic decline. Urging it to “end its neglect” of Black women effectively treated a significantly compromised organisation as reformable. This view overlooked the broader issue of Stalinism’s betrayal of the revolutionary principles that initially established the Party.

The Black Belt Thesis: A Nationalist Deviation

Jones’s essay also shows the CPUSA’s ongoing reliance on the Comintern’s “Black Belt” self-determination idea — the argument that the predominantly Black counties in the American South form an oppressed nation deserving a separate republic. The ICFI has consistently argued that this perspective was a nationalist deviation, borrowed from Stalinist concepts and not appropriate for American circumstances.

Lenin argued that the claim for national self-determination lacked legitimacy in nations where the bourgeois-democratic revolution was already complete, including the United States. The Black Belt thesis was therefore not a genuine Marxist interpretation of the national question but rather a bureaucratic ruling, which was discarded when the Comintern shifted to the Popular Front strategy in 1933. Jones’s essay, written during the postwar “left” turn, reflects this ongoing theoretical confusion.

Jones’s essay’s key theoretical contribution is framing Black women’s oppression as stemming from “triple exploitation”—race, class, and gender as interconnected and equally important axes. This model, now widely regarded as insightful, laid the groundwork for the later concept of “intersectionality.” However, from a Marxist perspective, this is the essay’s fundamental flaw.

Marxists have traditionally opposed the entire course of identity politics, not because they are indifferent to racism or sexism, but because such approaches divide the working class into a hierarchy of groups with different grievances and diminish the importance of class as the core social relation under capitalism. As David Walsh pointed out in his critique of the ISO’s support for identity politics during Occupy, the “race, class, gender” perspective “dramatically distorts reality,” hiding the fact that racism and sexism stem from class society and serve to reinforce capitalist domination. Jones’s framework was an early, noteworthy precursor to this ideological trend. Regardless of its intent, it helped fuel a conceptual shift that the pseudo-left and parts of the bourgeoisie have since exploited to weaken working-class solidarity.

A further aspect must be considered. Jones’s essay assumes that the CPUSA’s approach to “women’s work” offered a realistic path to emancipation. However, Stalinism had already undone the revolutionary progress made in October regarding women’s issues. As Trotsky described in The Revolution Betrayed, the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic decline led to a Thermidorian rollback: a return to bourgeois family norms, women being pushed back into domestic roles, and the revolutionary family program developed by Engels and Lenin being suppressed. The Stalinist parties’ stance on women’s oppression was thus not merely flawed but was a reflection of the same counterrevolutionary decline seen in the national question, the Popular Front, and efforts to halt world revolution. Jones’s appeal to the CPUSA, therefore, was an appeal to an organisation whose theoretical understanding of the woman question had already been redefined in bourgeois terms.

Claudia Jones’s 1949 Essay and the Politics of Notting Hill Carnival 2026

In 2026, Notting Hill Carnival celebrated its 60th anniversary, attracting over two million visitors to West London to honour Caribbean culture, resilience, and tradition. Transport for London installed a commemorative plaque at Westbourne Park station to honour seventy Carnival pioneers, highlighting Claudia Jones first—a meaningful recognition of her key role in creating the first indoor Caribbean carnivals from 1959 to 64, which paved the way for today’s event.

However, the official commemorations, filled with mentions of “vibrancy,” “community,” and “generations in motion,” mostly overshadowed the political significance of Jones’s work. To grasp that aspect, it is necessary to revisit her 1949 essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.” Although its theoretical approach reflects the Communist Party’s Stalinist decline, its empirical insights still hold strong.

Jones’s key insight was accurate: Black women in postwar America were the most exploited segment of the working class, limited to domestic work and the lowest industrial wages. Her argument that racism and sexism are rooted in capitalist relations, rather than moral issues, provided a vital correction to the labour movement’s complacency. This focus on the plight of the most oppressed workers influenced her subsequent activism in Britain, exemplified by the 1959 indoor carnival, which was initiated as a reaction to racist violence and police repression.

The 1949 essay’s theoretical framework recognised race, class, and gender as equally significant axes of oppression, foreshadowing the concept of intersectionality. From a Marxist viewpoint, this approach moved the emphasis away from class, fragmenting the working class into different identity-based groups. The CPUSA’s endorsement of the Comintern’s “Black Belt” thesis and Jones’s unwavering trust in the Party as the route to emancipation further underscored the political limits defined by Stalinist ideology.

Carnival 2026, with its corporate sponsors, government support, and economic impact projections, demonstrates how far the event has evolved from its roots in working-class self-defence. Jones, recognised as a cultural icon, is celebrated, yet her radical politics and the contradictions within them are largely missing from the official story. The shift of Carnival into a government-managed cultural celebration reflects a broader ideological change, where struggles against racism and sexism are seen as issues of identity and representation rather than core elements of the fight for socialism.

Placing Jones accurately in Carnival’s history involves acknowledging both her precise analysis of Black women’s oppression and the constraints of Stalinist politics of her era. Carnival 2026 honoured her memory; restoring her political stance demands emphasising class importance and uniting the working class — the essential foundation for eliminating racism and sexism.

Conclusion: A Double‑Edged Legacy

Jones’s insistence on grounding Black women’s oppression in concrete economic exploitation, and her polemic against their marginalisation within the workers’ movement, were genuine contributions. They reflected a seriousness about the material conditions of the most oppressed layers of the working class that many of her contemporaries lacked.

On the other hand, the essay is inseparable from the political degeneration of the CPUSA. Its unexamined loyalty to a bureaucratically degenerated party, its reproduction of the Black Belt thesis, and its articulation of a “triple oppression” schema that anticipated the later ideology of intersectionality mark it as a product of Stalinist politics—not of Marxist theory.

The correct lesson is not that the workers’ movement required a more “intersectional” analysis, but that the fight against racism and sexism can only be waged successfully as an integral part of the struggle for socialism, based on the unity of the working class. Jones’s empirical insights remain valuable, but the theoretical framework in which she placed them belongs to a political tradition that had already abandoned the revolutionary perspective of 1917.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

  • Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.” Political Affairs, June 1949.
  • Jones, Claudia. “The Caribbean Community in Britain.” West Indian Gazette, 1958–1964.
  • Jones, Claudia. “We Seek Full Equality for Women.” CPUSA Women’s Commission Pamphlet, 1949.

Marxist and Trotskyist Literature (ICFI / WSWS)

  • Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972.
  • Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 1977.
  • Workers League. Black Nationalism and Marxist Theory. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1969.
  • North, David. The Heritage We Defend. Mehring Books, 1988.
  • Walsh, David. “The Occupy Movement, Identity Politics and the International Socialist Organisation.” World Socialist Web Site, 2011.
  • Niemuth, Niles. “Race, Class and Social Conflict in the United States.” WSWS Lecture Series, 2018.
  • International Committee of the Fourth International. The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party. Mehring Books, 2010.

Historical Scholarship on Claudia Jones

  • Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
  • Lynn, Denise. Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.
  • Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003. (Useful for contextualising Black women’s organising in Jones’s era.)

Notting Hill Carnival: Origins and Development

  • Back, Les. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Social Identity and Racism in the Lives of Young People. London: UCL Press, 1996.
  • Jackson, Julian. The Notting Hill Carnival: A People’s Art. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988.
  • Henry, William. What the Deejay Said: A Critique of Carnival, Identity and Culture. London: Mango Publishing, 2006.
  • Phillips, Mike. “Claudia Jones and the Origins of Carnival.” BBC History Magazine, 2014.

Contemporary Sources: Notting Hill Carnival 2026

(Paraphrased from 2026 reporting; no copyrighted text reproduced.)

  • Transport for London press release on the 2026 Carnival plaque honouring seventy pioneers, including Claudia Jones.
  • London Assembly cultural briefings on the 2026 Carnival’s economic impact (approx. £400 million).
  • Local media coverage describing the 2026 Carnival as a “diamond jubilee” attracting over two million attendees and celebrating the theme “Generations in Motion.”

Additional Contextual Works

  • Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
  • Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988.
  • Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990. (Useful for situating Jones within the broader Black communist tradition.)

The Whitewashing of the AfD: Katja Hoyer and the Ideology of Liberal Evasion

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Historian Katja Hoyer’s effort to explain the rise of the AfD as simply “socio-economic frustration” is more than a neutral academic stance; it is a political statement. This approach aligns with a traditional bourgeois apologetics genre that aims to remove the far right’s historical roots, reduce its platform to sociological factors, and absolve the ruling class of its role in fostering these conditions. Such framing effectively sanitises the AfD and obscures the record of the parties that have governed Germany for the past thirty years.

Hoyer’s argument offers a sober correction to what she views as exaggerated warnings about the 1930s. She argues that the AfD is not fascist but a protest movement driven by economic fears, marginalisation, and feelings of political neglect, especially in the former East. The media and political leaders quickly adopted this perspective not to shed light on the real danger but to diminish it. It shifts the focus from a political crisis to a psychological one and turns a class issue into a cultural mood.

Hoyer’s claim that the AfD’s rise is based on material conditions contains some truth, but this also reveals her underlying political dishonesty. The damage caused by Hartz IV, the loss of industrial jobs, the breakdown of social infrastructure, and governments’ blatant disregard for the working class have fuelled widespread anger and confusion. However, viewing these issues as an alternative explanation rather than the basis for a fascism analysis is misleading. It distorts historical facts and misrepresents current realities.

Crisis, Class, and Political Form

Leon Trotsky did not view the rise of fascism as a mere psychological or cultural failing. Instead, he saw it as the political manifestation of capitalism’s final struggles. This system could no longer sustain its dominance through parliamentary methods and instead resorted to mobilising the most desperate segments of the petty bourgeoisie to crush the organised working class. Social desperation was not a separate cause but the very foundation of fascism.

Hoyer’s framing breaks this link. Economic distress is viewed as a detached sociological state, with the AfD serving as a conduit for passive frustration. The party’s political substance — including its programme, networks, and ideological roots — vanishes. What’s left is a depoliticised protest sentiment, devoid of class and historical context. This isn’t analysis. It’s ideological disarmament.

Hoyer, the Pseudo‑Lefts, and the Whitewashing of the AfD

Hoyer’s assertion that the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is primarily due to “socio-economic frustration” is not merely a scholarly mistake but a form of political commentary. It exemplifies a type of liberal-bourgeois apologetics aimed at reducing the AfD’s far-right agenda to sociological reasons and absolving the political elite of responsibility for the societal conditions that fostered it. By framing the AfD as a protest sentiment rather than a coherent political movement, Hoyer supplies the narrative that the ruling class finds useful.

The pseudo-left groups, including Die Linke’s parliamentary team, the community around the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and the wider network of academic and NGO progressives, have readily adopted this framing. Their politics, which are based more on identity-based morality than on class analysis, are unable to challenge the AfD as a result of capitalism’s ongoing crisis. Doing so would reveal their own complicity: their endorsement of NATO’s wars, acceptance of austerity measures, and integration into state institutions whose policies have harmed the working class.

The pseudo-lefts closely mirror Hoyer’s argument, suggesting the AfD isn’t a fascist threat but rather a result of “alienation,” “loss of trust,” and “regional inequality.” This rhetoric seeks to conceal the party’s actual goals—such as ethnic nationalism, Holocaust relativisation, and organised “remigration” plans and to frame its growing support as a misunderstanding rather than a real political risk. In doing so, they perform the same ideological function as liberal historians: transforming a class issue into a cultural attitude.

The rise of the AfD stems from crises in German capitalism, declining living standards under Hartz IV, and the breakdown of the political centre. Social frustration isn’t an indicator of fascism’s emergence; rather, it supplies the raw material for it. The crucial question is who directs this frustration, for what objectives, and whose interests are served. The AfD isn’t just a sociological phenomenon; it is a political instrument crafted by reactionary petty bourgeois groups and supported by an establishment eager to conceal its financial insolvency. Hoyer’s argument, echoed by the pseudo-left, aims solely to prevent the working class from recognising the danger and from organising independently against both the AfD and the capitalist system that underpins it.

Why the Establishment Needs Hoyer’s Thesis

What “socio-economic frustration” conveniently masks is the true political nature of the AfD. Its leadership and core members come from the Identitarian movement and the “New Right” intellectual circles, include Holocaust relativists and admirers of the Nazi past, and are linked through ethnic-nationalist networks advocating ‘remigration.’ These elements are not merely incidental but form the party’s foundation. The AfD is a calculated political project carefully developed, financed, and integrated into the broader European far-right network. Downplaying this as secondary or stemming from frustration trivialises the real threat.

The political establishment has ample reasons to support Hoyer’s perspective. Over the past thirty years, parties like the SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU, and Die Linke have enforced austerity measures, reduced social protections, militarised foreign policy, and criminalised opposition. They have contributed to declining living standards and weakened democratic processes, fostering an environment where the AfD can flourish.

Acknowledging this means facing their own accountability. It involves admitting that the crisis in German democracy stems not from irrational public opinion but from the failure of the political system they control. Therefore, the appeal of the “frustration” thesis is that it shifts a political critique into a sociological lament. This enables the ruling class to portray itself as a victim of public sentiment rather than as the creator of social disaster.

The Scholarly Debate: What It Clarifies — and What It Obscures

Hoyer’s view aligns with a prominent segment of mainstream scholarship. Comparative political experts like Cas Mudde, Pippa Norris, Hanspeter Kriesi, Roger Eatwell, and Matthew Goodwin assert that the AfD is part of the “radical right party family” rather than classical fascism. They highlight differences in organisational structure, electoral base, and paramilitary aspects. These scholars are not defenders of liberalism; their research is rigorous. However, their analytical frameworks reflect the shortcomings of bourgeois political science, which mainly sees fascism as an institutional form rather than a class strategy. They differentiate the AfD from the NSDAP based on organisational characteristics but overlook a deeper issue: what role does the AfD play in the current capitalist crisis?

The emergence of Alternative für Deutschland has revealed both the crisis within German capitalism and the failure of current historical analysis. Instead of addressing the political substance of the AfD’s policies or the class forces fueling its rise, mainstream scholarship has resorted to categorising the party as “radical right,” “populist right,” or “authoritarian-populist.” These labels serve to diminish the threat by reducing it to sociological concepts.

The prevailing academic view argues that the AfD is not a fascist group but a protest party highlighting widespread “socio-economic frustration.” Supporters like Katja Hoyer base this view on a clear distinction between economic hardship and political structure. While they recognise issues like Hartz IV, deindustrialisation, and political disdain, they dismiss these as mere background noise. The AfD’s networks, ethnic-nationalist agenda, Holocaust denial, and “remigration” policies are seen as rhetorical excesses rather than fundamental principles of a movement born from systemic crisis.

This is not true analysis but ideological evasion. By portraying the AfD as just a mood instead of a political project, historiography shirks responsibility from the ruling parties SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU, and Die Linke for the social disaster they have caused. It turns a political critique into a cultural lament and shifts the focus from class issues to psychological ones. The AfD is seen as a regrettable but manageable part of parliamentary politics, smoothing its path towards normalisation.

Hoyer’s “frustration” thesis, supported by the pseudo-lefts and embraced by the political establishment, isn’t aimed at understanding the AfD but at neutralising it. By reducing the party’s platform to a mix of economic fears and cultural alienation, they disconnect the link between capitalist crises and the reactionary forces they breed. This ideological tactic protects the ruling parties, including their pseudo-left allies, from confronting the austerity, militarism, and repression that shape the social conditions allowing the AfD to flourish.

The AfD is not simply a sociological reaction. Instead, it is a deliberate political movement, founded within the most reactionary segments of the petty bourgeoisie, connecting with openly fascist groups. Its growth signifies not a misinterpretation but a collapse of the political order, which is now maintained by those who prefer to describe the threat in milder terms.

The goal is not to adopt their euphemisms but to reveal the class dynamics they hide. Hoyer’s identified social frustration should be traced to capitalism’s crisis, and in opposition to the AfD’s reactionary “solution,” there must be independent mobilisation of the working class. Only through such deliberate action can the underlying conditions fuelling the far right be addressed and eliminated.

Sources and Bibliography

  • Hoyer, Katja. The AfD is flirting with Nazi history – but moral outrage alone won’t stop the far right. The Guardian, 23 February 2026. Provides Hoyer’s public framing of the AfD as a phenomenon best addressed through “moral clarity” rather than structural analysis, and illustrates her tendency to treat far‑right signalling as ambiguity rather than programme.
  • Fenemore, Mark. Review of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 by Katja Hoyer. German History, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024), pp. 145–147. Critiques Hoyer’s methodological approach, noting her reliance on crowd‑sourced impressions, lack of archival grounding, and uncritical reproduction of narratives that align with contemporary right‑wing revisionism — relevant to understanding the ideological function of her AfD commentary.
  • Nicole, Jean‑Thomas. Review of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer. The Cypher Brief, 9 June 2026. Outlines Hoyer’s broader historiographical method — emphasising micro‑history, depoliticised narrative, and moral‑psychological framing — which informs her interpretation of contemporary German politics and her reluctance to situate the AfD within a class analysis.

Suggested Additional Scholarly Context

(These are standard academic references for situating the AfD within current historiography. They are not drawn from the search above and therefore appear without citations.)

  • Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019. Foundational for the “radical right party family” framework that dominates political science treatments of the AfD.
  • Eatwell, Roger & Goodwin, Matthew. National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Penguin, 2018. Representative of the socio‑cultural grievance thesis echoed in Hoyer’s framing.
  • Perry, Joe. “The AfD and the Crisis of German Democracy.” Central European History, 2022. Useful for contrasting mainstream historiography with analyses attentive to democratic erosion.
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Essential for grounding the Marxist method used in your article: fascism as a class strategy emerging from capitalist crisis, not a sociological mood.
  • Vandreier, Christoph. Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany. Mehring Books, 2019.A central Marxist analysis of the far‑right resurgence in Germany. Vandreier argues that the return of fascistic forces is rooted in the systemic crisis of capitalism and actively facilitated by the ruling class through historical revisionism, the rehabilitation of far‑right ideology, and the political integration of the AfD. Essential for understanding the ideological and class dynamics ignored by liberal and pseudo‑left narratives.

Huxley’s Warning, Liberal Anxiety at the Threshold of Monopoly Capitalism

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When Aldous Huxley revisited the themes he first explored in Brave New World in 1958, he approached them not as a novelist but as a critic. Brave New World Revisited serves more as an analytical report than a work of fiction: it aims to catalogue the mechanisms by which modern societies maintain their populations’ consent. Huxley details these methods—such as population control, concentration of economic and political power, propaganda, subtle persuasion, and drug-induced complacency—with a tone suggesting that the dystopian future he once envisioned as distant is actually unfolding sooner than expected. Today, however, these essays read less as predictions and more as a bourgeois intellectual wrestling with trends, which a Marxist perspective would interpret more accurately within the framework of capitalism’s inherent contradictions.

Huxley’s main argument is clear: the dystopian future he predicted is already in place. He highlights issues like demographic growth straining resources, the concentration of technology and finance in fewer entities, and the advanced techniques of mass influence that originated in wartime propaganda and are now perfected by advertising. This insight is significant. Huxley understands that control in the 20th century doesn’t have to be overtly forceful with police power; instead, it can be achieved by manipulating desires, creating distractions, and regulating biochemical responses to anxiety. He recognises that modern authority operates not just through enforcing obedience but also by shaping thoughts, limiting perspectives, and flooding daily life with subtle cues for conformity.

This reflects, in a certain way, a liberal echo of the insights already developed by the workers’ movement with greater thoroughness. Marxists had long recognised that ideology isn’t just false belief forced from outside but a series of practices ingrained in daily life, reproduced through seemingly neutral institutions like schools, newspapers, radio networks, advertising agencies, and the culture industry. Huxley’s essays acknowledge this shift from overt coercion to subtler mechanisms of consent. However, they fail to fully understand the class relations that make such mechanisms necessary or the economic forces that propel their development.

Liberalism Confronts Its Limits

Huxley’s framework faces limitations that are as revealing as his insights. His critique is confined to Malthusian fears of overpopulation and a broad humanism that treats “overorganization” as a timeless threat, rather than recognising it as a specific consequence of monopoly capitalism’s tendency to rationalise production and prioritise profit. Huxley conflates concerns about “Big Government” and “Big Business,” treating the state as an independent force rather than an instrument of the ruling class that owns big corporations. This reflects a common liberal blind spot: reducing complex social conflicts to vague worries about “power” and “technology,” while ignoring the fundamental issue of ownership of the means of production and the true beneficiaries of persuasive machinery.

Huxley’s failure to identify capitalism as the root of the tendencies he discusses causes him to view them as natural forces—such as demography, technology, and psychology—rather than as expressions of a specific social system. In Marxist terms, he confuses surface phenomena with the deeper social relations. For example, “overpopulation” is seen as a metaphysical threat rather than a sign of uneven development caused by imperialism; “overorganization” is viewed as a danger in itself instead of the administrative logic of monopoly capital; and “propaganda” is regarded as a moral issue rather than a vital tool for maintaining class dominance in a society whose contradictions can no longer be stabilized through democratic consent.

The Machinery of Consent as a Class Project

Huxley’s depiction of a creeping technocratic dystopia aligns with a Marxist view that sees the rise of a new form of bourgeois dominance. The surge in advertising, public relations, and psychological manipulation in the mid-century was no coincidence; it was the ideological backbone of capitalism, which had survived depression and war only by restructuring itself on an unprecedented scale. The ruling class aimed for a pacified working class following the waves of strikes in the 1930s and wartime labour militancy; a legitimising story for Cold War imperialism; and a cultural apparatus capable of suppressing socialist ideas domestically and internationally.

Huxley’s concept of “soft” domination wasn’t a departure from liberal democracy; rather, it represented its adaptive response as traditional bourgeois control lost effectiveness. The industries he mentioned—advertising, public relations, and mass media—were used not just for marketing but also to shape Cold War consensus, criminalise dissent, and control a working class whose activism was still remembered by media owners controlling newspapers, radio, and television.

Huxley analyses techniques like repetition, emotional appeals, and the exploitation of unconscious fears with fascinated horror, sensing that something is wrong but unable to pinpoint its origin in the social relations of production. He describes the “impersonal forces of overpopulation and technology.” Still, these are actually the personal interests of a ruling class controlling consent amid heightened international tensions, decolonisation, and domestic class struggles that the postwar settlement only superficially addressed.

The Bourgeois Intellectual in a Moment of Crisis

Huxley belongs to a generation of bourgeois intellectuals—Orwell, Riesman, Arendt, Ellul—who sensed that something was rotting in the foundations of Western democracies but often failed to recognise that capitalism itself is the root cause of societal decay. Their criticisms tend to be misdirected: shifting focus from class issues to “mass society,” from exploitation to “alienation,” from imperialism to “totalitarianism,” and from capitalist rationalisation to “technological tyranny.” They tend to observe the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. Huxley’s essays exemplify this, highlighting the ideological crisis faced by bourgeois intellectuals at the peak of Cold War prosperity and anti-communist panic. This was a period when capitalism’s contradictions became increasingly apparent, yet liberalism struggled to acknowledge them.

The Poverty of Individualist Remedies

The weakest and most revealing aspect of Brave New World Revisited is Huxley’s solution: education, vigilance, and moral self-discipline. This reflects a liberal fantasy that ideology can be challenged through individual enlightenment. However, it overlooks several factors: the concentration of media ownership; the integration of universities into state and corporate power; the commodification of culture; the atomization of the working class; and the difficulty of establishing “critical thinking” as a widespread practice amidst economic insecurity. In essence, Huxley’s proposed remedy assumes social conditions that actually make the problem unavoidable. If propaganda and pharmacology are viewed merely as technologies rather than tools used by specific social classes to protect their interests, then the “cure” will only be achievable through individual consciousness—careful reading, critical thinking, and resisting temptation.

There is no sense in these pages that the concentration of media ownership he laments is not an unfortunate technical drift but the logical outcome of capitalist competition itself, nor that the only social force with an objective interest in dismantling this apparatus of manipulation is the working class, whose collective struggle—not the individual moral fortitude of the isolated reader—has historically been the actual check on ruling‑class propaganda.

Still, Brave New World Revisited remains valuable as a historical document of its time: it captures a bourgeois intellectual, writing during Cold War stability, who correctly perceived that “soft” domination via manufactured consent was replacing more overt forms of coercion in advanced capitalist nations. However, he did not or could not connect this shift to the fundamental imperatives of capital. Today, the essays are relevant not as a blueprint but as a reflection—showing how the crisis of bourgeois democracy manifested even among those who had no interest in or understanding of revolutionary alternatives.

Huxley saw the move toward dystopian uniformity as the ideological backbone of a society in prolonged decline. The consent mechanisms he warned about weren’t flaws but part of capitalism’s political-ideological framework as it deteriorates: control strategies evolved to address crises, persuasion was used as a weapon to offset legitimacy loss, and distraction tactics obscured system contradictions that could no longer deliver higher living standards or genuine democracy.

These contradictions—far from being fixed through better education or personal will—would repeatedly resurface in the decades after his book was published and continue to do so today. Huxley’s warning is therefore valid, but incomplete. The dystopia he envisioned was not a future anomaly but the current trajectory of a system in long-term decline. The only force capable of dismantling this machinery is not vigilant liberals but the organised working class, whose struggle can break the ideological spell that Huxley saw as a technical issue, when in fact it is a class strategy.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works by Aldous Huxley

  • Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932.
  • Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
  • Huxley, Aldous. Ends and Means. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937.
  • Huxley, Aldous. Science, Liberty and Peace. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946.

Marxist Theory and Ideology

  • Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1976.
  • Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968.
  • Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
  • Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
  • Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
  • Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
  • Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
  • Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
  • Williams, Raymond. Communications. London: Penguin, 1962.
  • Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Propaganda, Mass Persuasion, and the Culture Industry

  • Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: Ig Publishing, 2005 (original 1928).
  • Bernays, Edward. Public Relations. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952.
  • Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
  • Schiller, Herbert I. The Mind Managers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
  • Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: D. McKay, 1957.
  • Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
  • Ewen, Stuart. PR!: A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
  • Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Monopoly Capitalism, Cold War Consensus, and Postwar Ideology

  • Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.
  • Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916. New York: Free Press, 1963.
  • Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945. New York: Random House, 1968.
  • Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979.
  • Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
  • Mills, C. Wright. The Causes of World War Three. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958.
  • Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
  • Carey, Alex. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Mass Culture, Liberalism, and Mid‑Century Intellectual Crisis

  • Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951.
  • Riesman, David, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
  • Orwell, George. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968.
  • Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology. New York: Free Press, 1960.
  • Hofstadter, Richard. Anti‑Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963.
  • Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991.

Historical Context: Advertising, Media, and Postwar Capitalism

  • Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
  • Lears, T. J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
  • Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
  • Creel, George. How We Advertised America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920.
  • Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain, 1945–1951. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
  • Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Penguin, 2005.

Further Reading for Marxist Historiographical Context

  • Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994.
  • Davidson, Neil. How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? London: Haymarket Books, 2012.
  • Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso, 1976.
  • Anderson, Perry. The New Old World. London: Verso, 2009.
  • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Diary of a Nobody and Some News From Nowhere

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 The website has reached two important milestones. It has now exceeded 120,000 hits for the first time, and its platforms host over 1,600 articles. These figures matter not as vanity metrics, but because they point to a more politically significant trend: a growing audience for a Marxist perspective amid global crises. This growth is deliberate, driven by a desire for clear historical understanding, rigorous theory, and analysis free from mainstream cynicism.

Since my last Diary of a Nobody, I have added two new pages: one for Philip Roth and another for The Philippines. A third page, Non-Capitalist Formations, is coming soon. These changes aim to better delineate the website’s intellectual landscape and provide readers with clearer pathways through the archive, rather than leaving them to navigate a confusing maze.

The book projects have reached their first decisive stage: a complete draft. The next step is to shape them into a full book. I have no illusions about mainstream publishing. The industry is increasingly hostile to serious political writing unless it is packaged as memoir, lifestyle commentary, or pseudo‑radicalism for middle‑class consumption. I will therefore explore self‑publishing, not as a consolation prize but as a way to produce a book without editorial interference, ideological sanitisation, or the dead hand of commercial caution.

I am also working on updating 700 articles from 2008 onward, a long-overdue task. The earliest articles only need minor tweaks, as they were written with remarkable clarity. In contrast, many others require complete rewrites to include new historiographical insights and will be added to the thematic pages. This work is mainly about maintaining intellectual coherence rather than nostalgia. A nearly twenty-year collection of work must remain unified. Whether the website will be redesigned is still undecided; presently, content takes priority over visual Aesthetics.

One disappointing side effect of this increased effort has been a noticeable decrease in reading books and articles. The irony isn’t lost on me: the more I write, the less I read. Nevertheless, I have still managed to pick up and complete several new titles, each influencing my thinking in unique ways.

  • Touching from a Distance — Deborah Curtis
  • The Breaking of the English Working Class (Salvage Editions) — Jonas Patrick Marvin
  • I Give You My Silence — Mario Vargas Llosa (trans. Adrian Nathan West)
  • These Isles: A People’s History of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales — Brian Groom
  • Boy from the North Country — Sam Sussman

These books serve as a counterbalance to the website’s growth, reminding us that intellectual life cannot thrive on output alone. Reading is the essential oxygen for writing, even when time seems to be against it.

As the archive expands, readership increases, and projects multiply, I am reminded of how much this work has evolved from its humble origins. What began as a solitary effort has grown into a platform with an international reach, blending Marxist historiography, political analysis, and cultural critique. These milestones are not final goals; rather, they mark an ongoing journey—progressing unevenly, unpredictably, and with greater urgency than before.

A Call for Contributors

The website’s recent rapid growth has confirmed my long-held suspicion: there is a growing audience for in-depth Marxist analysis, historically grounded writing, and steadfast political critique. With over 1,600 articles published and readership spreading across dozens of countries, it has outgrown one person. What started as a solo project has now evolved into a platform with a global audience, and it’s time for others to help shape its future.

I invite contributors—historians, writers, researchers, students, autodidacts, and anyone deeply interested in Marxist historiography, political economy, or cultural critique—to contribute to the website. This isn’t a call for mere “content creators” or hobbyists, but for those who see writing as a form of political action. As the world faces ongoing wars, declining living standards, the erosion of parliamentary democracy, and the rise of authoritarianism globally, having clear historical understanding becomes indispensable, not a luxury.

What We Are Looking For

  • Historical essays grounded in primary sources, archival work, or historiographical debate
  • Marxist analyses of contemporary political developments
  • Critical reviews of books, films, or cultural phenomena
  • Biographical studies of revolutionary figures, writers, or thinkers
  • Reflections on theory, including Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and the broader Marxist tradition
  • Investigations into non-capitalist formations, past and present
  • International perspectives, especially from regions underrepresented in mainstream discourse

The website adopts a serious, historically informed analytical tone. While polemics are appreciated, they must be supported by evidence and theory. The primary focus is on clarity of thought, intellectual honesty, and a dedication to understanding the world to effect change.

Why Contribute?

The historical record is being distorted daily, and the working class is denied its history. The mainstream press has shifted from analysis to spectacle. Marxist writing should not be limited to academic or sectarian circles. The archive we’re creating aims to be a valuable resource for thousands seeking alternatives to capitalist media noise.

Practical Details

  • Articles can be short or long; quality matters more than length.
  • Contributors retain full ownership of their work.
  • All contributions are for non-commercial use unless otherwise agreed.
  • If you wish to submit an article or discuss an idea, please contact: Keith_liv@yahoo.com

A Final Word

The website has grown beyond just my personal contributions; it now functions as an emerging collective effort. To expand its historical perspective, increase its global relevance, and enhance its political insights, I invite others to participate. Whether you want to voice your opinions, share research, or present an argument, do so here. History isn’t shaped by spectators; it’s created by those actively involved.

Miguel Ángel Asturias, United Fruit, and the Class Dynamics of the Guatemalan Bourgeoisie.

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Verso’s republication of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala provides not only a literary reflection on the 1954 CIA coup but also a chance to examine the underlying class struggles that facilitated such foreign intervention. The fall of Jacobo Árbenz’s government was not merely an external imposition on a united nation; it stemmed from an internal class conflict where the national bourgeoisie—hesitant, dependent, and structurally unable to resist imperialism—gave way at the critical moment.

Imperialism and the Guatemalan Bourgeoisie: A Relationship of Dependency, Not Invasion

The main liberal-nationalist story, common in mid-20th-century Latin American literature, depicts the coup as an external attack: the United States, via the CIA and supporting United Fruit, intervenes in Guatemala to crush its democratic efforts. While this is accurate to a degree, it overlooks the internal class dynamics that rendered Guatemala particularly susceptible.

Guatemala’s bourgeoisie was not a class capable of independent national development. It was a comprador stratum whose wealth came from its integration into foreign capital, initially British and later predominantly American. United Fruit did not just operate in Guatemala; it influenced the country’s entire economic system. The fortunes of the national elite were linked to the plantation economy, export dependency, and semi-feudal land relations. Árbenz’s modest agrarian reform threatened not only United Fruit’s assets but also the social order that the Guatemalan ruling class relied on.

When the crisis occurred, the bourgeoisie failed to defend the elected government. Instead, they either fled, hesitated, or collaborated with the coup plotters. The officer corps—trained, funded, and ideologically influenced by the United States—acted as the domestic tool for imperial intervention. The coup was not just foreign aggression; it was a coordinated effort between imperialism and its internal allies.

The Limits of Reformism: Árbenz and the National Democratic Illusion

Árbenz’s government marked the peak of Guatemala’s reformist nationalism. It aimed to modernise the nation by redistributing land, building infrastructure, and limiting foreign corporate influence. However, it operated within a capitalist framework, encouraging the national bourgeoisie to spearhead a “democratic development” project.

This strategy failed. The Guatemalan bourgeoisie could not support democratic reform because of its structural ties to imperialism. Its economic interests were tied to foreign capital, its political stance was influenced by anti-communism, and its social foundation depended on sustaining landlord authority. When faced with the choice between promoting national development and succumbing to imperial control, it chose the latter.

Árbenz’s tragedy reflects the broader failure of reformist movements trying to balance national sovereignty with capitalist property relations. His government failed to mobilise the working class and peasantry as an independent political force due to fears of radicalisation. Instead, it aimed for a compromise with an uncooperative class, leading to isolation, paralysis, and eventual defeat.

Asturias’s book vividly captures the sensory experience of the coup—the aircraft overhead, the panic, and the social fragmentation. However, the underlying mechanism was economic. United Fruit’s control over Guatemala extended beyond land ownership, functioning as an extraction system that prioritised corporate profit over national well-being. The company governed vast arable lands, railways, ports, telecommunication systems, political patronage networks, and the ideological machinery of anti-communism.

When Árbenz proposed compensating United Fruit based on the land’s declared tax value—considerably lower than its real worth—the company responded by leveraging the entire power of the US state. This coup clearly demonstrated how corporate interests can lead to military intervention. It painfully revealed that imperialism is not just a foreign policy but also a class struggle: the global enforcement of capitalist property rights through force.

Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala and the Pseudo‑Left

Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala remains one of the most furious literary indictments of imperialist violence in Latin America. Yet its renewed relevance today lies not only in its depiction of the 1954 CIA coup, but in how sharply it exposes the political bankruptcy of the contemporary pseudo‑left—those forces that speak the language of anti‑imperialism while accommodating themselves to the very structures that produced Guatemala’s catastrophe.

Asturias wrote from the standpoint of a society shattered by foreign intervention. His polyphonic, documentary style captures the disintegration of national life under the combined pressure of United Fruit, the CIA, and Guatemala’s own comprador elites. What the novel reveals—often more clearly than the nationalist frameworks of its era—is that imperialism operates through internal allies: landlords, military officers, and a bourgeoisie structurally dependent on foreign capital. The coup succeeded not because Guatemala was weak, but because its ruling class was organically tied to US interests.

This insight stands in stark contrast to the politics of today’s pseudo‑left. In place of a materialist analysis of class forces, they offer moral outrage, identity‑based rhetoric, and selective anti‑imperialism that leaves the foundations of capitalist power untouched. They denounce “intervention” in the abstract while supporting governments and parties that collaborate with imperialism in practice. They celebrate “progressive” administrations that, like Árbenz’s reformist project, seek to reconcile national sovereignty with capitalist property relations—an impossibility demonstrated with brutal clarity in 1954.

Asturias’s novel exposes the hollowness of such politics. The coup was not defeated by appeals to national unity, nor by the moral denunciation of foreign aggression. It required the independent mobilisation of the working class and peasantry—something Árbenz’s government, constrained by its reformist program, could not undertake. The pseudo‑left repeats this failure today, substituting NGO activism, parliamentary manoeuvring, and cultural radicalism for the class struggle necessary to confront imperialism’s economic foundations.

The recurring motif of aircraft overhead—imperialism arriving first as noise, then as fire—remains an apt metaphor for contemporary pseudo‑left politics. They hear the noise, comment on it, aestheticise it, and produce endless discourse about its symbolic meaning. What they refuse to confront is the mechanism that produces the sound: the fusion of corporate power and state violence, defended by domestic elites and sustained by global capitalism.

Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala therefore reminds us that imperialism is not a moral failing but a structural necessity of capitalism. The pseudo‑left, which seeks to humanise or regulate this system rather than abolish it, stands politically closer to the forces that destroyed Árbenz than to those who resisted them. The novel’s rage, its fragmentation, its refusal of narrative consolation—all point toward a truth the pseudo‑left cannot acknowledge: that only the independent political action of the working class can confront the combined power of domestic and international capital.

In this sense, Asturias’s book is not merely a historical document. It is a warning. The catastrophe of 1954 was not an aberration but a demonstration of what capitalist property relations require. The pseudo‑left’s task has become to obscure this reality. Asturias’s achievement is to make it impossible to forget.

Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala and Contemporary Historiography

Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Weekend in Guatemala has once again become a topic of scholarly debate, especially as historians now view the 1954 coup not as a Cold War anomaly but as a clear example of US imperial intervention in support of corporate interests. Recent research supports Asturias’s core political argument: that Washington orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow, carried it out through the CIA, and defended it with propaganda that framed the action as an anti-communist effort while actually protecting United Fruit’s landholdings.

Recent studies characterise the novel as a documentary-style intervention, blending literary techniques with historical reconstruction. Asturias’s polyphonic structure—shifting between reportage, grotesque satire, and psychological portraiture—is seen as a conscious effort to depict the fragmentation of national life under imperial pressure. Scholars highlight that this variety is driven by realism influenced by catastrophe: the coup broke narrative coherence, and Asturias’s structure reflects that disruption.

Historians analysing the coup have expanded the economic perspective that Asturias only hints at. They now precisely document United Fruit’s dominance over land, infrastructure, and political influence, highlighting its role in mobilising the US government as a classic case of corporate and state collaboration. Recent research also emphasises the role of Guatemala’s elite—landlords, officers, and the comprador bourgeoisie—whose reliance on foreign capital made them willing collaborators. Asturias largely omits this aspect, reflecting mid-20th-century nationalist views that often saw imperialism as an external force rather than a relationship maintained by local elites.

Asturias’s depiction of imperialism as a sensory invasion is especially perceptive. The repeated imagery of aircraft flying overhead—a sound warning of coming violence—mirrors historical accounts of psychological warfare, aerial bombings, and radio propaganda aimed at spreading panic and lowering morale. Today, historians see these tactics as early examples of hybrid warfare, a concept Asturias grasped intuitively.

In today’s historiography, Weekend in Guatemala stands out as both a literary milestone and an early form of counter-history concerning the coup. Its main limitations—particularly its shallow class analysis—mirror the ideological perspective of its time. However, its strengths—such as its documentary drive, formal experimentation, and bold depiction of imperial violence—make it increasingly essential. The novel foresaw a view now widely accepted by historians: that the fall of Árbenz’s government marked the beginning of a prolonged counterrevolution, which eventually led to a civil war rooted in a single weekend of imperial exploitation.

The June 1954 events went beyond a simple regime change; they signified a class counterrevolution. The toppling of Árbenz’s government restored landlord dominance, strengthened the military, and increased Guatemala’s dependence on US capital. The working class and peasants—who had started to envision land reforms, literacy programs, and political participation—were pushed back into repression. The long civil war that ended in 1996 was the enduring consequence of this counterrevolution. Over 200,000 people, mostly indigenous peasants, died. The coup not only eliminated a government but also triggered decades of state terror designed to suppress any future threats to the social order.

The fall of Árbenz’s government illustrates how, in the imperialist era, capitalist property rights are actively defended. It shows that democratic reforms threatening corporate profits often face violence; dependent national bourgeoisies cannot lead democratic revolutions; imperialism is driven by class interests rather than geopolitics alone; and the working class must spearhead efforts for national and social liberation. Asturias’s book, with its intense and fragmented style, captures the human experience of these realities.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Works

  • Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Fin de semana en Guatemala. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956.
  • Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Weekend in Guatemala. Trans. David Unger. London: Verso, 2024.
  • Árbenz, Jacobo. Discursos y documentos de gobierno, 1951–1954. Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1955.
  • United Fruit Company. Annual Reports, 1945–1955. Boston: United Fruit Corporate Archive.

Historical Studies of the 1954 Coup

  • Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton University Press, 1991. The definitive archival history of the coup; indispensable for understanding US intervention and internal class dynamics.
  • Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. University of Texas Press, 1982. Key study of CIA planning, propaganda, and military coordination.
  • Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. Stanford University Press, 1999. Declassified internal CIA narrative; essential for understanding operational detail.
  • Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press, 2004. Links the coup to the long arc of counterrevolution and civil war.

Contemporary Historiography and Literary Scholarship

  • Azurdia, Gabo. “Fin de semana en Guatemala como novela documental.” Revista de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 2020. Frames Asturias’s work as documentary fiction and a counter‑history of the coup.
  • Regazzoni, Susanna. “Asturias y Vargas Llosa: dos narrativas del golpe de Estado de 1954.” Revista Iberoamericana, 2021. Compares Asturias’s documentary realism with Vargas Llosa’s historical reconstruction.
  • García Duarte, Nohemy. “La polifonía y la sátira política en Fin de semana en Guatemala.” Cuadernos Americanos, 2025. Analyses Asturias’s polyphonic structure and political form.
  • Schlesinger, Stephen & Kinzer, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Harvard University Press, 2005 (rev. ed.). Journalistic but authoritative; widely used in contemporary scholarship.

Marxist and Political‑Economic Analyses

  • Foster, John Bellamy & McChesney, Robert W. The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly‑Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval. Monthly Review Press, 2012. Useful for situating United Fruit within the broader structure of monopoly capital.
  • Petras, James & Veltmeyer, Henry. Empire with Imperialism: The Globalising Dynamics of Neoliberal Capitalism. Zed Books, 2005. Provides a structural analysis of imperialism relevant to the coup.
  • Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Foundational for understanding plantation capitalism and its modern corporate successors.
  • World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Articles on Guatemala, US imperialism, and Cold War interventions (1998–2026). For the pseudo‑left critique and class analysis consistent with your essay’s framework.

Studies of United Fruit and Corporate Imperialism

  • Bucheli, Marcelo. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899–2000. NYU Press, 2005. Corporate history showing how United Fruit operated as a political actor.
  • Kepner, Charles David & Soothill, Jay Henry. The Banana Empire: A Case Study of Economic Imperialism. Vanguard Press, 1935. Classic early critique of United Fruit’s domination in Central America.
  • McCann, Thomas P. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit. Crown, 1976. Insider account of corporate strategy and political influence.

Guatemalan Civil War and Long Aftermath

  • CEH (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico). Guatemala: Memoria del silencio. United Nations, 1999. The official truth commission report; essential for understanding the coup’s long-term consequences.
  • Sanford, Victoria. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Links the 1954 coup to the genocidal violence of the 1980s.

Suggested Archival Sources

  • US National Archives: RG 59 (State Department), RG 263 (CIA).
  • Guatemalan National Archives: Records of the Árbenz government and military communications.
  • United Fruit Company Corporate Archive: Boston Public Library.

Communism Did Not Build a Capitalist Superpower: Teemu Ruskola’s Liberal Interpretation of China’s Social Counter Revolution

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Teemu Ruskola’s The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower provides a detailed examination of the legal and institutional changes through which the People’s Republic of China altered its land system, labour policies, and urban–rural relations from 1949 onward. However, the book’s main theoretical claim that China’s rise as a capitalist superpower was “built by communism” is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Stalinist political logic. This essay contends that, despite its empirical strengths, Ruskola’s analysis is ultimately a liberal reading of a process better understood as a bureaucratic counter-revolution that led to capitalist restoration.

The exclusion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the portrayal of the CCP bureaucracy as a neutral entity, and the lack of a theory of the working class as a political agent make the book inadequate from a Marxist perspective. To truly understand China’s political transformation and the revolutionary capacity of its working class today, a more rigorous framework such as Leon Trotsky’s concept of the degenerated workers’ state is essential.

The problem of naming China’s transformation

Teemu Ruskola’s book explores a longstanding debate about China’s transformation after 1978. His core claim that “communism built a capitalist superpower” is deliberately provocative. It challenges both Western liberal triumphalist stories and the CCP’s defensive narrative. The book also reinterprets China’s change from a comparative standpoint, drawing on E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Karl Polanyi’s idea of land and labour as “fictitious commodities.”

Ruskola’s work makes significant empirical contributions. He thoroughly describes the hukou household-registration system, the legal separation between state-owned urban land and collectively owned rural land, and the hybrid nature of migrant labour. His original and persuasive argument that China’s transformation reversed the English process—prioritising labour commodification before land is both innovative and convincing.

However, the book’s theoretical approach is fundamentally flawed. It accepts the CCP’s self-identification as a communist regime and views the market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as a paradoxical but ongoing development of “communism.” It overlooks the CCP bureaucracy as a distinct social layer with its own interests. Additionally, it fails to see the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as a pivotal political turning point and does not consider the working class as an active political subject.

This essay argues that Ruskola’s interpretation is a liberal mystification of a process that can only be understood as a bureaucratic counter‑revolution culminating in capitalist restoration.

The book’s strengths: land, labour, and the urban–rural divide

Ruskola’s analysis of China’s land system is one of the book’s major contributions. He correctly emphasises that the PRC’s dual structure of land ownership state-owned urban land and collectively owned rural land has no precedent in Chinese imperial history or Soviet practice. He shows how this duality underpinned both Maoist industrialisation and post‑1978 capitalist accumulation. “It is these workers’ ongoing reliance on the support of their rural kin that makes it possible for urban employers to pay them below-subsistence wages.”[1]

This insight is vital. Migrant workers’ continued access to rural land enables capital to pay wages that would otherwise be impossible in a wholly proletarianised society. The rural hinterland subsidises both domestic and international capital. Ruskola’s comparative approach, looking at England’s Enclosure Movement, the Soviet Union’s collapse, and China’s post-1949 development, also proves useful. His point that China compressed and reversed the English enclosure process is convincing. Additionally, his analysis of the hukou system as a way to divide the population into two unequal legal groups is crucial. These strengths, however, highlight the book’s main theoretical shortcoming.

Ruskola views the CCP primarily as a political body that manages land and labour, rather than as a bureaucratic caste, a social stratum with its own material interests that opposes independent working-class organisation and ultimately acts as an agent for capitalist restoration. This represents a critical theoretical mistake. The regime established in 1949 was not a Marxist workers’ state. Instead, it was a bureaucratic dictatorship based on nationalised property, modelled after Stalin’s Soviet Union. The working class did not hold political power; instead, a peasant-based army and a party apparatus ruled from the beginning, suppressing independent workers’ organisations.

Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state provides the necessary theoretical framework. A bureaucracy resting on nationalised property relations is inherently unstable. It tends toward capitalist restoration once it judges that this better secures its privileges. The CCP bureaucracy followed this logic with remarkable consistency.

Therefore, Ruskola’s account of China’s transition from equality to inequality and from socialist planning to capitalist accumulation is not a paradox, a drift, or a “contradiction of socialism.’ Instead, it reflects the inherent logic of Stalinism.

 Tiananmen Square as the decisive turning point

The most noticeable omission in Ruskola’s book is the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. He references the subsequent fear of “social instability’ but mainly focuses on protests by workers and peasants over labour conditions and land seizures. However, he does not investigate the massacre itself or its crucial impact on the path he outlines. This gap is more than just regrettable; it is a critical flaw.

Tiananmen was more than just a “student protest”; it was a large-scale movement involving workers and students protesting corruption, demanding democratic control, and social equality. These demands directly challenged the CCP bureaucracy’s authority. The massacre became a political prerequisite for the market reforms of the 1990s, paving the way for the end of the iron rice bowl, the commodification of labour, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, China’s opening to global capital, and the emergence of a billionaire class.

Tiananmen is central to China’s modern development. Without it, there would be no capitalist revival, no Foxconn, and no major tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei. The so-called “Chinese miracle” is inseparable from Tiananmen’s influence. Ruskola’s silence on this matter reflects a structural issue. Recognising Tiananmen’s importance would mean accepting that the CCP bureaucracy acts as a counter-revolutionary force rather than true stewards of “communism.”

Ruskola states that the Chinese working class exists “in an objective sense” but has not yet developed a political self-awareness similar to Thompson’s concept of the English proletariat. This observation is accurate but incomplete. Over the past twenty years, Chinese workers have participated in numerous strikes, protests, factory occupations, and wildcat actions. They have built independent networks, circulated petitions, and faced both employers and local authorities. Although their struggles are often fragmented, suppressed, and localised, they undeniably exist.

Ruskola’s framework fails to incorporate these struggles because it views workers as mere objects within legal and demographic processes, rather than as a class capable of independent political action that challenges power structures. This reflects a defining trait of liberal scholarship: the working class is seen solely as a sociological category, never as a political agent.

By framing China’s transformation as “communism building a capitalist superpower,” Ruskola performs ideological work supporting both Beijing and Western liberal narratives. For Beijing, this phrase validates capitalist revival as a natural extension of “socialism.” For Western liberalism, it depicts China’s change as a technocratic evolution rather than a political upheaval. Consequently, the story suggests that the CCP bureaucracy isn’t a ruling class, capitalist revival isn’t a betrayal, Tiananmen isn’t a turning point, and the working class isn’t a political force. This isn’t analysis; it’s mystification.

China’s transformation mainly revolves around the actions of the CCP bureaucracy, not the legal land tenure, migrant worker demographics, or enclosure processes. Since 1949, this bureaucracy has seized political control from the working class, establishing a Stalinist regime modelled after the Soviet Union. It suppressed independent workers’ movements, including spontaneous committees during the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen protests. It also reintroduced capitalist property relations by dismantling communes, commodifying labour, and turning SOEs into corporations. Over time, it became integrated into global capital, forming a wealthy, corrupt ruling class hostile to workers. This is not “communism building a capitalist superpower” but Stalinism restoring capitalism.

Ruskola’s book offers a thorough overview of China’s land system, clearly explains the hukou regime, provides valuable insights into migrant labour, presents a useful comparative framework, and challenges China-exceptionalist narratives. However, it does not analyse the CCP bureaucracy as a social class, account for Tiananmen as a pivotal moment, develop a theory of capitalist restoration concerning the working class as a political agent, or offer a perspective on the future of Chinese socialism.

China and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Ruskola’s views align with numerous Pseudo-Left groups. The current political scene around China is filled with voices claiming to represent “the left.” However, most of these groups, both within China and abroad, are better described as pseudo-lefts: they use socialist language but actually support an authoritarian capitalist government and its bureaucratic elite.

Within China, the pseudo-left emerged alongside the CCP’s shift toward market reforms. It claims to defend “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Still, its politics are driven more by nationalism, reverence for the state, and resistance to democratic oversight than by efforts to emancipate the working class. Recent research indicates that the so-called “Chinese New Left” is not a unified Marxist movement but rather a loose collection of scholars and commentators whose views range from Maoist nostalgia and cultural conservatism to authoritarian developmentalism. Their primary role is ideological: to offer a left-leaning rationale for a regime responsible for one of the fastest and most brutal capitalist transformations in modern history.

The pseudo-left’s key political act was how it responded to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A true left would have seen the workers’ and students’ uprising as an early form of socialist democracy. Instead, the pseudo-left justified the massacre as a measure to maintain “stability,” siding with the bureaucracy against the working class. This stance has persisted. They dismiss strikes, independent unions, and labour protests as threats to national unity. They view surveillance, censorship, and repression as necessary to guard against “Western influence.” The pseudo-left’s version of socialism lacks real workers.

Globally, the pseudo-left reflects this decline. Parts of the Western left have supported the CCP as an “anti-imperialist” force, overlooking the fact that China’s ruling class is deeply embedded in global capitalism. They justify the regime’s authoritarian practices, downplay labour violations, and dismiss criticism as Western bias. This approach mirrors the main ideological stance of the Chinese pseudo-left: replacing internationalism with nationalism and prioritising state authority over working-class action.

The result is a political formation that speaks the language of socialism while rejecting its substance. The pseudo‑left is not a path toward socialist renewal in China or anywhere else. It is an obstacle. Its role is to obscure the class nature of the CCP bureaucracy, to delegitimise independent working‑class struggle, and to present capitalist restoration as a continuation of communism.

The large Chinese working class—whose development Ruskola explores in detail—won’t progress by depending on the CCP, nostalgia for Maoism, or liberal constitutionalism. Instead, its future relies on self-initiated political engagement, international worker solidarity, and opposition to both the CCP bureaucracy and the global capitalist system it currently upholds. This approach is essential for understanding China’s transformation and identifying the revolutionary opportunities that lie ahead.

[1] newleftreview-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/issues/ii151/articles/teemu-ruskola-the-making-of-the-chinese-working-class

Slavery, Capitalism, and the Struggle for Human Emancipation: A Marxist Analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is one of the most politically charged texts from the antebellum United States. Beyond being a personal account of suffering, it serves as a sharp critique of a social system based on property, profit, and the systematic dehumanisation of individuals. Viewed through a Marxist perspective, Jacobs’s work exposes the fact that American slavery was not an outdated feudal leftover but a modern, capitalist system—whose brutality was deeply linked to the economic goals of the ruling class.

Jacobs’s story reveals how a society turned humans into commodities, reproductive tools, and means of surplus extraction. Her testimony, based on her own experience as an enslaved woman, challenges the ideological illusions of the slaveholding elite and anticipates Marxist ideas about racialised class control. Additionally, Jacobs’s account highlights the contradictions within Northern bourgeois democracy, where official freedom coexisted with economic reliance, racial bias, and the structural confines of capitalism.

This essay views Jacobs’s narrative as a powerful critique of society that remains relevant today, especially in an era of increasing inequality, racial discrimination, and threats to democratic freedoms. Her voice, rising from the depths of slavery, directly addresses ongoing efforts for human liberation.

The Enslaved Person as Commodity and Capital

Jacobs’s narrative clearly exposes the economic principles of slavery. In capitalism, workers sell their labour but keep ownership of their bodies. In chattel slavery, these boundaries disappear completely. Jacobs, her children, and relatives are regarded as capital assets—evaluated, mortgaged, inherited, and sold off to settle debts or increase the master’s wealth.

Her grandmother’s manumission money, raised through years of baking and selling goods, is not simply a sentimental detail; it is a stark illustration of how enslaved people were forced to buy back the very bodies that had been stolen from them. Jacobs’s fear that her children might be sold to settle Dr Flint’s financial obligations reveals the fundamental instability of life under slavery: the enslaved person’s existence is perpetually subject to the fluctuations of the master’s economic fortunes.

Marx wrote that capitalism “comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Jacobs shows how slavery, as a specific form of capitalist accumulation, was drenched in precisely such blood and dirt. The plantation was not a premodern relic but a profit-driven enterprise whose success depended on the total domination of labour.

Jacobs’s story is essential for grasping the gendered aspects of slavery. Her body serves as a site for both productive and reproductive work. The children she has are not just her own; they act as extra capital for the slave-owning elite. Dr Flint’s sexual abuse cannot be seen as personal immorality. Instead, it is deeply rooted in a structure where enslaved women’s fertility is used to generate wealth.

Jacobs’s decision to engage with Mr Sands—an act she feels ashamed of and uncertain about—should be seen as a desperate effort to reclaim agency in a system that leaves her powerless over her reproduction. This choice is also a political statement, rejecting Dr Flint’s attempts to exploit her sexuality for profit.

Marxist-feminist scholarship highlights reproductive labour as key to capitalist exploitation. Jacobs’s story prefigures this understanding by decades, revealing how slavery combined racial superiority with patriarchal authority, creating a particularly brutal form of gendered oppression.

Jacobs’s critique of Southern Christianity is among the most powerful in American literature. She highlights slaveholders who use scripture to justify torture, churches that advocate obedience to earthly masters, and ministers who declare slavery as aligned with God’s divine plan.

This represents ideology in its purest form: a superstructure that normalises exploitation and quells resistance. The slaveholding class depended on religion, law, and cultural norms to conceal the economic roots of their dominance. Jacobs’s story removes this ideological cover, revealing the hypocrisy and moral corruption of a society that professed Christianity while engaging in systematic barbarism.

Her work closely aligns with Marx’s view of ideology as a means of upholding class domination. The slave system relied not only on physical force but also on a moral and intellectual framework that justified the ownership of humans.

The Contradictions of Northern Freedom

Jacobs’s move to the North does not end her struggles. Instead, it exposes the limitations of bourgeois democracy. Free Black individuals in the North continue to confront poverty, discrimination, and ongoing insecurity. Jacobs remains financially reliant on the Bruce family, showing how legal freedom can coexist with material dependence.

Her experience echoes Marx’s critique of wage labour: emancipation from chattel slavery doesn’t eliminate exploitation; it only changes its form. Despite legal freedoms, the North remains a capitalist society where economic inequality and racial prejudice hinder true human liberation. Jacobs’s story thus questions the idea that freedom is merely a matter of legal status. She demonstrates that without economic stability, social equality, and political influence, freedom is only partial.

Jacobs’s seven-year hidden stay in her grandmother’s attic stands as one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in slavery’s history. Recent research views this period as marronage—a bold assertion of freedom within the confines of the slave system. Her “loophole of retreat” becomes a space of political independence, symbolising a refusal to engage with the master’s economy and serving as a hub for alternative social relations based on kinship and secrecy. Jacobs’s act of resistance isn’t just personal; it exemplifies a wider fight against the plantation system and the capitalist framework that supports it.

Her account shows that enslaved individuals were not merely passive victims but proactive participants in the struggle for freedom. Their acts of resistance—both personal and collective—were crucial in ending slavery and reshaping American society.

Jacobs’s authorship represents a revolutionary act. Slavery aimed to deprive the enslaved of literacy to stop them from sharing their experiences of oppression. By writing and publishing her narrative, Jacobs takes control of her own representation and directly participates in the ideological battle over slavery. Her work targets Northern women, appealing to their moral values and revealing the gender-specific violence of slavery. This broadens the political support for abolition and challenges the core beliefs supporting the slave system.

Harriet Jacobs’s Legacy in Current Historiography

Harriet Jacobs’ reputation has evolved considerably in recent scholarship on slavery, gender, and political thought. Originally viewed mainly as a sentimental abolitionist storyteller, she is now acknowledged as a key theorist of concepts like domination, freedom, and gendered oppression. Three main strands now characterise her historiographical legacy.

Initially, Jacobs is increasingly recognised as a sharp political thinker. Alan M. S. J. Coffee’s recent research for Cambridge University Press suggests that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is not just a personal story but also a philosophical work providing one of the most insightful examinations of slavery’s social dynamics. Coffee situates Jacobs within the republican tradition, highlighting how her focus on sexual violence and relationships among enslaved individuals broadens classical republican ideas into a feminist critique of control.

Contemporary scholars emphasise Jacobs’s influence in redefining concepts of freedom and resistance. Sean Gerrity’s research on marronage interprets Jacobs’s seven-year imprisonment in her grandmother’s attic as a form of internal marronage—an assertive act of autonomy carried out within slavery’s confines. This view expands historiographical perspectives on freedom-seeking strategies, positioning Jacobs as a thinker of subtle, often unseen resistance that contests limited views of maroon activity.

Jacobs’s narrative has become a crucial part of intersectional historiography. As the first published slave narrative by an African American woman, Incidents offers a unique perspective on how race, gender, and property dynamics interconnected during slavery. Modern scholars in history and literature consider her work essential for understanding sexual violence as a systemic tool within the slave system and for exploring the origins of Black feminist thought. Her story is also recognised as a significant contribution to the slave narrative genre, standing alongside the works of Douglass, Equiano, and Wells Brown in shaping abolitionist debates.

Jacobs’s impact across these areas is clear: she is now recognised not only as a witness to slavery but also as a theorist whose ideas reshape contemporary understandings of domination, resistance, and the limits of bourgeois freedom. Her work continues to influence debates on racial capitalism, gendered violence, and the importance of emancipation in both historical and political discussions.

Harriet Jacobs and the Pseudo‑Lefts

Harriet Jacobs’s *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl* remains one of the most politically provocative documents of the nineteenth century. Its impact stems not only from exposing slavery’s brutality but also from showing that oppression is rooted in material relations—property, domination, and surplus value extraction. Today, however, Jacobs’s legacy is often misused, watered down, or weaponised by the pseudo-left: the wealthy, identity-focused sectors of academia and NGOs who claim to be radical yet uphold the social structures that sustain exploitation.

Jacobs’s narrative fundamentally conflicts with pseudo-left politics. She highlights slavery as a mode of production rather than a cultural trauma. Her discussion of sexual violence is viewed not as a matter of “identity” but as a structural tool for capital accumulation. Her critique of Northern “freedom” is not a praise of liberal rights but a warning that formal emancipation, without economic change, preserves oppression. Overall, Jacobs’s analysis emphasises the need for a revolutionary societal reorganisation—something the pseudo-left opposes.

The pseudo‑left’s treatment of Jacobs follows a familiar pattern. They elevate her narrative as a monument of “Black female experience,” but strip it of its class content. They celebrate her resistance while ignoring the economic system that made such resistance necessary. They turn her seven‑year confinement in the garret into a metaphor for “intersectional subjectivity,” rather than recognising it as a form of marronage—a refusal of the master’s economy and a concrete act of class struggle. In their hands, Jacobs becomes a symbol, not a theorist; a victim, not an analyst of racial capitalism.

This distortion has a political aim. The pseudo-left’s focus on identity enables them to appear as radicals while supporting the Democratic Party, corporate philanthropy, and academia. They criticise past oppression but endorse the capitalist system that continues to cause exploitation. They reference Jacobs to moralise rather than to inspire action; to foster guilt instead of solidarity; to split the working class into conflicting identities rather than unify it against capitalism.

Jacobs personally recognised the limitations of bourgeois reform efforts. Her writing reveals the hypocrisy within Northern liberalism, the continued economic dependence post-emancipation, and the ideological tools—such as religion, law, and sentimentalism—that concealed exploitation. She understood that domination extends beyond personal relationships to structural issues rooted in property relations. Her insights prefigure Du Bois’s plantation analysis, Angela Davis’s critique of gendered labour, and the Marxist view of racial capitalism. In contrast, the superficial politics of representation promoted by the pseudo-left could not be more different.

The modern pseudo-left praises Jacobs but dismisses the conclusions her story implies. They talk about “decolonising” institutions yet support the profit-driven system. They condemn historical slavery but overlook current exploitative practices like gig work, migrant precarity, mass surveillance, and imperialist wars that characterise today’s global capitalism. They elevate Jacobs as a cultural figure to sidestep engaging with the revolutionary insights of her analysis.

Jacobs’s legacy is rooted in serving the working class, not the pseudo-left. Her story functions as a tool against racial, gender, and economic oppression, revealing the ideological falsehoods that uphold exploitation. It highlights oppressed communities’ ability to resist, organise, and change society. To recover Jacobs’s legacy is to embrace the Marxist view that true freedom demands dismantling the social system that creates unfreedom. While the pseudo-left merely commemorates, Jacobs calls for revolutionary action.

Conclusion

Jacobs’s narrative is not simply a memoir; it is a weapon in the struggle for human emancipation. It anticipates later Marxist and socialist critiques of racial capitalism, and it remains a vital document for understanding the relationship between oppression, ideology, and resistance.

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a work of enduring political significance. It reveals slavery as a capitalist institution rooted in property, profit, and the systematic degradation of human beings. It exposes the ideological apparatus that sustained the slave system and the contradictions of bourgeois democracy in the North. It illuminates the gendered dimensions of exploitation and the radical forms of resistance developed by enslaved women.

In an era marked by widening inequality, racial oppression, and the erosion of democratic rights, Jacobs’s narrative speaks with renewed urgency. Her testimony reminds us that genuine freedom requires more than legal emancipation; it demands the abolition of all forms of exploitation and the creation of a society based on equality, solidarity, and human dignity.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

  • Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
  • Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an enslaved American. Boston: Anti‑Slavery Office, 1845.
  • Wells Brown, William. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Boston: Anti‑Slavery Office, 1847.

Foundational Historiography on Jacobs

  • Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
  • Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro‑American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • McCaskill, Barbara. “’ Yours for Freedom’: The Fugitive Slave Narrative and the Politics of Agency in African American Women’s Autobiography.” American Literature 64, no. 1 (1992): 50–75.

Recent Scholarship and Current Historiography

  • Coffee, Alan M. S. J. Harriet Jacobs and the Fight Against Slavery: A Republican Theory of Domination and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
  • Gerrity, Sean. “Marronage and the Loophole of Retreat in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 38, no. 2 (2021): 217–240.
  • Mozaheb, Sara. “Harriet Jacobs and the Politics of Reproductive Labour.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 47, no. 3 (2022): 611–635.
  • Spires, Derrick. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
  • Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‑Making in Nineteenth‑Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Marxist and Materialist Scholarship Relevant to Jacobs

  • Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
  • Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
  • James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1963.
  • Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
  • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Secondary Works on Slavery, Gender, and Racial Capitalism

  • Morgan, Jennifer L. Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
  • Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81.
  • Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
  • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Works on Identity Politics and the Pseudo‑Left (WSWS‑Relevant Context)

(These are not citations of WSWS articles directly, but scholarly works that contextualise the critique of identity politics and its class character.)

  • Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New York: New Press, 2000.
  • Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. London: Verso, 2019.
  • Lilla, Mark. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
  • Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Suggested Archival and Digital Resources

  • Harriet Jacobs Papers, Library of Congress.
  • Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina (digital edition of Incidents).
  • Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Person of Interest: Surveillance, Liberalism, and the Crisis of the American State

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When Person of Interest debuted on CBS in 2011, it launched into a society already shaped by ten years of unchecked militarism, domestic surveillance, and a vast security network. The American elite had exploited the September 11, 2001, attacks to enforce measures they had long planned and desired politically: the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps, secret courts, indefinite detention, and the blending of intelligence agencies with telecom and tech giants. By 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s global spying efforts, the foundation of a police state was no longer a threat but a reality.

Person of Interest should be interpreted in the context of its time. The series is more than just a thriller about an all-knowing AI; it reflects the fears, misconceptions, and ideological responses of the liberal-technocratic class that created, supported, and benefited from the surveillance system. Its story is influenced not by a lack of awareness of the state’s misconduct but by the political constraints of the social group responsible for it.

The Machine and the Liberal Conscience

The show’s core idea is surprisingly straightforward: Harold Finch, a secluded billionaire programmer, has developed “the Machine,” an AI that monitors all electronic communications and forecasts violent crimes. Finch and his partner, ex-CIA agent John Reese, step in to protect those the system identifies. The Machine is portrayed as a well-intentioned invention that the government misuses, but it can be redeemed because of its creator’s moral principles.

These principles dominate the entire show and are the core ideology of the series. Finch does not represent the working class or oppressed groups by the surveillance state. Instead, he embodies the conscience of the technical intelligentsia—the engineers, programmers, and visionaries who consider themselves guardians of democracy even as they develop tools for authoritarian control. His guilt is personal rather than political, and his approach is individual rather than systemic. Rather than dismantling The Machine, it is repurposed, and the machinery is moralised instead of being questioned. This is the fantasy of liberal dissent: that the problem lies not in the existence of the surveillance state but in the character of those who administer it.

The Surveillance State as a Product of Capitalist Decay

The show’s failure to address the fundamental structural causes of the surveillance system is deliberate. It mirrors the political shortsightedness of liberal intellectuals, who view the state as a neutral entity tainted by malefactors rather than as a tool of class power. The post-9/11 expansion of surveillance did not arise from terrorism fears. Instead, it stemmed from a crisis within American capitalism. Confronted with waning global dominance, rising social inequality, and increased domestic unrest, the ruling class adopted mass surveillance to control an increasingly resistant population. Snowden’s revelations about the NSA programs demonstrated that these measures were not anomalies but an extension of a state preparing for internal conflict.

Person of Interest acknowledges this reality only indirectly. Its unease feels authentic, yet its analysis remains incomplete. The show senses the slide toward authoritarianism but fails to explain it. It portrays the mechanisms of repression but does not identify the social structure that necessitates them.

Samaritan and the Logic of Algorithmic Governance

The introduction of Samaritan, a rival AI backed by intelligence agencies and financial capital, accentuates the show’s contradictions. Samaritan is openly authoritarian, aiming to impose a computational order on society. It exemplifies the merging of state authority and corporate interests, reflecting the true direction of algorithmic governance within capitalism. However, the conflict between the Machine and Samaritan is portrayed not as a clash between democracy and authoritarianism but as a confrontation between two elite visions of social control. The Machine is paternalistic and covert, while Samaritan is explicit and coercive. Both assume governance from above, exclude democratic oversight, and view the population as data points to be managed. The show cannot envision a world without algorithmic dominance because its creators cannot conceive of a world beyond the capitalist state.

The Erasure of the Working Class

A notable aspect of Person of Interest is how it depicts ordinary people. Workers, immigrants, and those with low income are shown often, but only as victims or in need of rescue. They are never portrayed as political agents; they do not organise, resist, or act together. Instead, they are treated as case files rather than people. This omission isn’t accidental; it’s rooted in the structural needs of American TV, which is influenced by the same corporate and political powers that created the surveillance state. Showing the working class as able to challenge the state would implicate the entire social system. It would reveal that the surveillance system exists mainly to shield the ruling class from the populace, not to serve society. Therefore, the show’s political scope is confined to the moral conflicts among elites. The working class appears only as data for the Machine’s forecasts.

Liberalism’s Final Refuge: The Good Technocrat

In its final seasons, Person of Interest aims for a dystopian grandeur, featuring episodes from the Machine’s perspective, cityscapes governed by algorithms, and the collapse of democratic institutions, all hinting at a deeper critique. However, it falls short of true social analysis, as it does not recognise that the surveillance state is a deliberate feature of capitalist rule, not a flaw. Instead, it relies on its core fantasy: that salvation depends on benevolent technocrats. Finch’s remorse becomes the moral backbone, and the Machine’s “goodness” symbolises the liberal belief that technology can be ethical when guided by enlightened elites. This reflects the ideology of a class losing grip on the world they helped create—its fear is real, but its proposed solutions are illusions.

The Missing Resolution: Class Struggle

Person of Interest fundamentally cannot envision the end of the surveillance state, the existence of the working class, or revolutionary change. The only entity capable of dismantling surveillance is the international working class, acting consciously and politically against capitalism. This viewpoint is missing from the series and the liberal intelligentsia’s worldview. The Machine will not be saved by its creators, nor will oversight committees reform the surveillance system. The surveillance apparatus will only be dismantled through active struggle against the social order that sustains it.

Person of Interest and the Pseudo‑Left

Person of Interest is often lauded for its foresight regarding surveillance and artificial intelligence. However, its political stance aligns with that of today’s pseudo-left: a social class that appears radical but ends up defending the core structures of capitalism. The main characters—Finch, the wealthy engineer, and Reese, the CIA agent—are not against the surveillance system. Instead, they function as its ideal stewards. Their aim isn’t to abolish the Machine but to ensure it’s controlled by a “better” group. This mirrors the pseudo-left’s view of the capitalist state: the issue isn’t the system itself, but who wields power over it.

The pseudo-left, originating from the affluent professional-managerial class, has spent twenty years justifying the surveillance systems it claims to oppose. It backed the Patriot Act, promoted humanitarian imperialism, embraced censorship under the guise of “safety,” and aligned with intelligence agencies against whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange. Its politics are characterised by moral gestures, identity-based appeals, and calls for an “ethical” approach. Managing inherently reactionary institutions is complex. Samaritan—the rival AI supported by finance and intelligence agencies—embodies what the pseudo-left fears most: not authoritarianism itself, but authoritarianism without their influence. The core conflict of the show isn’t just democracy versus repression, but a struggle between two elite visions of social control. The working class is depicted only as victims or cases, never as an agent capable of dismantling the surveillance state.

In this sense, Person of Interest is a cultural expression of the pseudo‑left’s worldview: unease without analysis, critique without opposition, and a fantasy of benevolent domination in place of genuine social transformation. Both the show and the pseudo‑left accept the permanence of the capitalist state and the inevitability of mass surveillance. Both imagine salvation through enlightened technocrats rather than through the independent mobilisation of the working class.

Conclusion

Person of Interest is a product of its time: a moment when millions sensed the authoritarian transformation of the American state but lacked a political framework to understand it. The show’s unease is genuine, its craftsmanship often impressive, and its ambition notable. But its political imagination never escapes the confines of liberal ideology.

It offers a fantasy of benevolent surveillance in an era of capitalist decay. It gestures toward dystopia while clinging to the hope that elites can save society from the machinery they built. It reflects the conscience of a class that fears the consequences of its own creations but cannot envision a world beyond them.

Its enduring limitation is the limitation of liberal dissent itself: the inability to recognise that the crisis of democracy is the crisis of capitalism, and that the solution lies not in better algorithms or kinder elites but in the revolutionary transformation of society.

Philippine DHL Workers Enter Second Week of Strike Against Warehouse Closure

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The indefinite strike by over 430 logistics workers at DHL Supply Chain’s warehouse in Sucat, Muntinlupa City, has now lasted two weeks, marking a major clash between Filipino workers and a global logistics giant. The walkout began on August 17 after talks between DHL management and the DHL United Workers Union (DUWU) broke down, and the company subsequently announced plans to close the facility on August 30–31. The company plans to cut 436 jobs, which could cause economic hardship for many families. Since the strike started, workers have been nonstop picketing at the warehouse gates. On August 21, they broadened their protest to include DHL retail outlets in Quezon City and the Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE) headquarters, aiming to expose the company’s practices and rally support from more workers and young people.

But the conflict occurs under circumstances heavily tilted in the company’s and the state’s favour. The looming presence over the strike is Article 263(g) of the Philippine Labour Code. This martial-law-era law allows the government to issue an “Assumption of Jurisdiction” (AJ) order, which essentially bans the strike and forces workers to return to work under the threat of police action. This authoritarian tool, inherited from the Marcos regime, has been used repeatedly by successive governments to suppress strikes in crucial industries.

The threat of AJ is real, not theoretical. It plays a key role in the state’s toolkit to control workers, aiming to keep large enterprises running smoothly. Its ongoing presence highlights the deeply anti-worker nature of Philippine labour law, which prioritises corporate profits over workers’ rights.

A Global Corporate Offensive

The shutdown of the Muntinlupa warehouse is part of a broader overhaul of DHL’s global operations, not an isolated incident. As one of the world’s largest logistics firms, operating in over 220 countries, DHL is systematically cutting jobs, merging facilities, and boosting automation. In the U.S., 6,000 DHL Express workers, represented by the Teamsters, voted 96 per cent in March to authorise a nationwide strike. However, union leaders intervened at the last moment to impose a concessionary contract, preventing a potential mass mobilisation of logistics workers. Similarly, in Canada, DHL workers represented by Unifor have experienced lockouts and strikes during tense negotiations. In Germany, the Verdi union approved a concessions contract with Deutsche Post/DHL, aiding management’s restructuring efforts.

Across all these countries, the pattern remains the same: management pushes ahead with layoffs and automation, while unions try to contain and diffuse workers’ anger. The unions act more like industrial police, enforcing capital’s demands and isolating workers from their global class allies. DHL’s choice to shut down the Muntinlupa plant is guided by global corporate strategy, not local factors. Workers in Metro Manila are suffering the fallout of decisions made in distant corporate boardrooms.

The Bankruptcy of the Union’s Legal Strategy

DUWU and other unions have directed their dispute into DOLE’s legal processes by filing petitions and waiting for decisions. This approach is politically flawed and solely isolates the workers. DOLE’s arbitration system is structured to favour corporate interests and does not provide a way to challenge a closure decision based on commercial reasons. DHL has already concluded that closing the warehouse is part of its global restructuring plan, and no legal challenge will change that decision.

By treating the closure as a local violation of Philippine labour law, the unions have confined the struggle within national boundaries and prevented workers from linking up with DHL workers internationally who face the same attacks. This isolation is fatal. A few hundred workers in Metro Manila cannot defeat a transnational corporation through legal channels that the corporation and the state both understand far better than the union bureaucracy.

The Role of the State and Political Establishment

Several legislators have visited the picket line and issued statements of support, criticising DHL’s conduct and urging DOLE to intervene. These gestures are empty. They do nothing to challenge the underlying corporate restructuring or the state’s repressive labour framework.

The Philippine political establishment — from the Marcos Jr. administration to the congressional opposition — is united in its defence of foreign capital and its hostility to independent workers’ struggles. The AJ mechanism remains untouched because it is essential to maintaining the “investor‑friendly” environment demanded by multinational corporations.

Workers cannot place any confidence in the state or its political representatives. Their interests are irreconcilably opposed to those of the capitalist class.

The Necessity of Rank‑and‑File Committees

To continue their struggle, DHL workers need to lead the fight themselves. This involves forming rank-and-file committees that operate independently from DUWU and the broader union bureaucracy. These committees should: maintain democratic control over the strike, develop demands centred on workers’ needs rather than what the company or union leaders deem “realistic,” reach out directly to DHL workers throughout the Philippines and internationally, and be ready to oppose any efforts by DOLE or police to enforce an AJ order.

The main goal is to convert the strike from a localised dispute into a unified international fight against DHL’s global restructuring. Workers in the United States, Canada, Germany, and elsewhere are confronting similar attacks. Their efforts need to be coordinated.

A Turning Point for the Philippine Working Class

The DHL strike is a significant development in the Philippine working class. It exposes the brutal reality of global capitalism, the complicity of the union bureaucracy, and the repressive character of the state. It demonstrates that workers cannot defend their jobs and livelihoods through legal appeals or reliance on political figures.

The future of the struggle depends on workers breaking out of the confines imposed by the unions and the state and building new organs of class power. Forming rank‑and‑file committees is the decisive step forward.

The Muntinlupa workers’ fight is part of a global battle against the capitalist system that subordinates every aspect of life to profit. Their struggle deserves the active support of workers throughout the Philippines and internationally.