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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Orwell 1984

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

John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)

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

Voltaire, French writer and philosopher (1694-1778)

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

Alan Bennett, English playwright (1934- )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

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

William Wordsworth

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

― John Milton, Areopagitica

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

Karl Marx

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

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

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

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

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

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

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

Socialist Workers Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Walter Benjamin

“Even the Dead Won’t Be Safe”: Walter Benjamin

“Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces”.

Georgi Plekhanov

 “A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others”.

Georgi Plekhanov

“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”

Bertolt Brecht

In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]

Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.

Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin’s formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.

As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.

The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]

Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.

The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.

As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, “Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him”.[3]

Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.

Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky

At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.

To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.

Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.

Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, “Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?” This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture’s mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]

Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]

Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.

Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism

Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left’s organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.

Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.

Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky’s writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.

Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.

NOTES

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)

The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky’s writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.

[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003

[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html

[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-

Raphael Samuel (1934–1996) was a leading figure in post-war British historical culture. He was a Marxist/Stalinist-trained intellectual, a founder member of the History Workshop movement and the journal History Workshop, and a powerful advocate for what became known as “history from below”, the study of the social and cultural lives of ordinary people rather than ruling elites.

Samuel was not an orthodox historian by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone studying Samuel’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute would see that his note-taking and working methods were chaotic at best. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite ‘ Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and sub-headed under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to be constantly reshuffled so that new combinations of ideas appeared, presuppositions might be overturned, and surprising connections thereby be generated. All that was needed was reams of rough paper, scissors and a pot of glue, phalanxes of lever-arch files, and a hole-puncher.’[1]

His method and traits were learnt from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century. Samuel would have absorbed not only their note-taking style but a large chunk of their politics. But his work revitalised popular and local history, encouraged collective research methods, and brought working-class memory, oral testimony, and archival recovery into historians’ practice. These are enduring gains. The recovery of workers’ lived experience helps counter the abstractions and elitism of bourgeois historiography.

Before founding the Universities Left Review, Samuel was a member of the British Communist Party. He left two years after Kruschev’s secret speech. He was a very young member of the Communist Party Historians Group. The CPHG arose inside and around the British Communist Party and the wider milieu of Communist and labour politics between the 1930s and 1950s. Its best‑known members—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and others—produced influential work that challenged bourgeois and Whig traditions of national history and insisted on the agency of popular classes. The group’s scholarship should be read against the background of the political orientation of the Stalinist bureaucracy—its Popular Front politics, its nationalism and its accommodation to bourgeois forces—which indelibly affected the intellectual formation and institutional constraints faced by historians working within or alongside the Party.

The CPHG did, however, make enduring contributions to socialist historiography. It overturned Whig teleology, insisted that ordinary people make history, and enriched archival and methodological practice. These were advances that Marxists should defend and extend. However, the group’s political roots in a Stalinist‑influenced party had concrete consequences. The Communist Party’s “People’s History” orientation and Popular Front politics tended to domesticate class conflict, subordinating proletarian independence to alliances with liberal or petty‑bourgeois currents. The result was, at times, an apologetic stance toward state bureaucracy and a reluctance to carry the political implications of Marxist analysis into the present.

Raphael Samuel and the Universities Left Review

Samuel was a leading British Marxist historian and a central figure in the post‑war “history from below” movement. He helped found the History Workshop and was associated with the small‑circulation left journals and intellectual networks that emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, among them the Universities and Left Review (ULR). ULR (1957–60) brought together student radicals, young intellectuals and some socialist critics of the university and the Labour Party. It aimed to radicalise university life and cultural debate, critiquing orthodox academic history and promoting popular and labour history.

Samuel’s main collaborator on ULR was Stuart Hall. Hall’s political and intellectual trajectory—from the Universities and Left Review (ULR) and the New Left to Cultural Studies and his later role in Marxism Today was the product of definite class formations, political realignments and the changing social position of layers of the intelligentsia after World War II. Hall’s work cannot be treated as an abstract contribution to theory divorced from the social interests it expresses.

As Paul Bond writes,‘ Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”. Longtime Pabloite Tariq Ali wrote that Hall said, “half-joking to friends that his cultural studies project was politics by other means”. That indeed it was: a project that replaced class as the central political factor by race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality and other “sub-cultures” and “identities”, making it impossible, in the end, to address capitalist exploitation. Instead, the struggle had to be conducted in every supposedly “relatively autonomous” sphere. The logic led to garden-variety single-issue, bourgeois-reformist politics, as an article Hall co-authored last year made clear: “Mobilising resistance thus requires alliances of a sort which only a multi-focused political strategy can hope to construct”.[2]

From a historical‑materialist standpoint, the importance of Samuel, Hall and their ULR project lies less in any single programmatic contribution than in the social position they occupied: a layer of petty‑bourgeois intellectuals reacting to the crises of post‑war capitalism and the limitations of established reformist politics. Their cultural interventions—renewed attention to working‑class experience, local history and culture—were progressive in exposing bourgeois narratives and recuperating popular memory. Yet, understood in class terms, this milieu tended to substitute cultural critique for a political orientation to the working class as a revolutionary subject.

Samuel was in the Communist Party at the same time as the founder of People’s History, A.L. Morton. As Ann Talbot brings out in her essay on Christopher Hill, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.

People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy, which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.’ [3]

The ULR and similar currents reflected objective social forces: a post‑war expansion of higher education, the growth of a politically conscious intelligentsia, and the fragmentation of the labour movement. These social origins explain both the strengths and limits of the project. Samuel’s cultivation of popular history responded to an objective weakness: official historiography ignored the working class. But the limitations were also objective: petty‑bourgeois layers, detached from a sustained orientation to working‑class organisation, are prone to turning working‑class culture into a form of moral critique rather than mobilising it as the basis for revolutionary political independence.

The lessons of Samuel and the ULR are twofold and complementary. First, recovering working‑class history and culture is necessary: it combats bourgeois erasure, builds pride, and strengthens class identity. Second—and decisive—cultural work must be subordinated to political orientation: it must be used to connect workers to a programmatic, internationalist Marxist perspective and to build rank‑and‑file organisation and a revolutionary party. Without that link, cultural renewal risks becoming an appendage of liberal reformism or of petty‑bourgeois radicalism.

Workshop of the World

Raphael Samuel’s essays, collected in this book, came under the rubric of a “people’s history”. They include material often associated with the idea of Britain as the “workshop of the world”. They do offer rich documentary and cultural evidence about working‑class life, memory and resistance. Samuel’s micro‑histories become instruments for understanding how material conditions, class formation and consciousness interact.

He helped institutionalise a new historical practice—through the History Workshop movement and collections of oral histories and local studies—that shifted attention away from great men and state archives toward popular culture, labour traditions and everyday life. This intervention broke important ground: it democratised history, widened the sources, and made working-class experience visible in ways that conventional academic histories often ignored. Yet, from a classical Marxist and Fourth International standpoint, Samuel’s legacy is both positive and limited.

Samuel’s History Workshop arose in the 1960s and 1970s amid rising labour militancy and intellectual currents that critiqued elitist historiography. He collected oral testimony, household economies, popular ritual, and the souvenirs of everyday life. This expanded the archive, exposed working‑class creative resistance and revealed how consciousness is formed through struggle, culture and community. These contributions are invaluable for socialists building working‑class memory and confidence.

But Samuel’s practice frequently stopped at descriptive recovery. While he emphasised the autonomy and creativity of popular traditions, he often treated culture as an end in itself—celebrating particularisms and local solidarities without always linking them systematically to the political organisation required to overthrow capital. In moments where the transformation of society is the question, empirical cultural history must be integrated with an analysis of capitalist accumulation, state power and the strategy of revolutionary organisation.

Samuel emerged in the same milieu that produced the 1960s New Left and the cultural turn in history. That milieu included significant intellectual currents hostile to classical materialism — strands of the Frankfurt School, post-Marxist and post-structuralist thought.

The domination of this school of thought meant the working class paid a heavy price for this fragmentation of the working-class perspective. Samuel’s work, while recuperative of working-class sources, often stopped short of linking that history to a program for working-class political independence. Samuel’s practical insistence that historians listen to workers, use oral history, and develop local archives advanced the working class’s capacity to know itself. This recuperation of proletarian experience strengthens historical consciousness when it is anchored in a materialist understanding of class relations.

At the same time, Samuel’s culturalism and the New Left milieu into which he was embedded often moved away from a rigorous classical Marxist method. The petty-bourgeois currents of the New Left tended to relativise class as the central subject of history and to prioritise cultural, identity, or therapeutic frameworks over an analysis anchored in production and property relations.

Robert Tressell and the Early Socialists

There are two chapters in the book that I want to pay particular attention to. Robert Tressell (Robert Noonan), author of The Ragged‑Trousered Philanthropists, occupies an important place in the cultural and political formation of British working‑class socialism. His novel gives an unsparing depiction of artisan and factory life, petty‑bourgeois illusions, and the corrosive ethics of capitalist wage relations.

But to situate Tressell historically and theoretically, it is important to locate him within the longer trajectory from the early socialists and utopian currents to the emergence of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary program defended by the Marxists. Socialists like Fourier, Owen, Saint‑Simon, and later various British and French reformers raised vital moral and institutional objections to capitalist misery. They exposed capitalism’s inhumanity and proposed cooperative or communal remedies. Tressell’s literary moralism continues that tradition. His vivid exposé of exploitation aimed to awaken sympathy and spur reform among his readers.

Tressell’s milieu in Edwardian Britain was artisans, small contractors, and a growing industrial proletariat showing both the objective development of capitalist productive forces and the subjective unevenness of working‑class consciousness. Tressell’s novel contributes to shaping consciousness but cannot substitute for organised, political working‑class activity.

                           Origins of People’s History

Samuel’s essay on People’s History is probably one of his finest. Under the guise of the People’s History genre, it reopened questions long suppressed by institutional historiography: ritual, popular politics, communal solidarities, and the cultural forms that sustain working-class life.

People’s history—often called “history from below” was not merely a literary genre but a social product rooted in class relations. From the standpoint of the materialist conception of history, historical consciousness arises out of concrete social practice: collective labour, struggle, deprivation and organisation produce memories, traditions and forms of political culture. As Plekhanov stressed in tracing the emergence of the theory of class struggle, ideas about history flow from changes in property relations and social development; historians who ignore class obscure the motor forces of social change.

In Britain, after World War II and especially from the late 1960s, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop movement institutionalised the turn to popular and cultural history. They emphasised archives of everyday life, oral history and collective memory, seeking to make the working class visible within historical narrative. This cultural recovery reflected real social processes: the postwar restructuring of capitalism, renewed political radicalism among students and workers, and a crisis in the authority of traditional elites.

There is a progressive side to the genre in that, correctly applied, it undermines the bourgeois monopoly on the past, restores agency to workers and oppressed groups, and supplies documentary armour for organising—stories of strikes, self‑organisation and mutual aid that can inspire present struggles. Recovering these experiences helps politicise layers of working people by showing that social change was made by ordinary people, not by abstract “great men.”

However, when detached from a dialectical, class‑struggle method, people’s history can become an end in itself: localist nostalgia, culturalism, or therapeutic memorialising that fails to connect the past to present class relations and the necessity of a revolutionary program.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory, 1994

Samuel did not write many books but concentrated on essay writing. He only wrote one sole-authored book in his lifetime, Theatres of Memory (1994). A second volume of Theatres of Memory, titled Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, was published in 1998, after his death.

As Samuel McIlhagga points out, ‘It is perhaps a unique feature of British intellectual culture that its greatest Marxists have more often been essayists than authors of lengthy theoretical treatises. The self-contained responses to a specific political or historical problem, or the witty corrective to dominant orthodoxies, are well suited to a nation whose intellectual elite are as closed and coherent as Britain’s. When E. P. Thompson wrote “The Peculiarities of the English,” his breathless polemic seeking to correct a dismissive attitude to the radicalism of his country’s history found in the work of the Marxist writers Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, he was pitting himself against two thinkers whom he knew personally and who edited a journal to which he, too, had contributed.[4]

Samuel’s was a new orientation which drew on Marxist themes of class, labour, and social conflict. Still, he combined them with a broad culturalist sensibility and an emphasis on the historian as activist-organiser. From the standpoint of classical Marxism, this combination has both strengths and weaknesses. It should be pointed out that Samuel was not a classical Marxist.

Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994, ed. with Paul Thompson) was a foundational intervention in the study of popular memory, oral history and the politics of historical representation. Samuel recasts history as a living, contested cultural terrain: memory is staged, rehearsed and institutionalised in festivals, museums, songs, local traditions and archives. There are similarities and major differences between Samuel’s work and E.P. Thompson’s. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) developed a class-formation method that treated class as a historical process: classes are made through concrete struggles, economic relations and political experience, not by sociological labels or algebraic categories. Thompson insisted on grounding consciousness in workers’ material conditions and lived struggles.

Samuel, on the other hand, followed a culturalist tradition, i.e., history-from-below, collective memory, institutions, everyday life, shifting attention to the cultural forms, practices, and repositories through which people experience, narrate, and reproduce social life — oral tradition, rituals, popular politics, festivals, literary tastes, and memory.

These two contending historiographical approaches clashed in 1979. According to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, “The 1979 History Workshop staged a rehashing of what was already one of the most vituperative disputes on the New Left, between E.P. Thompson and the advocates of ‘theory’. Thompson ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent 2017 biography of Samuel, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some members had already suggested forming a breakaway workshop to get back to the study of labour history. After Thompson’s blow-up, the final plenary session was quietly cancelled. Samuel, who probably took this decision, was essentially a Thompsonian: he defended a focus on ‘real life experience’ and empirical work, which he suggested could ‘do more for our theoretical understanding of ideology and consciousness than any number of further “interpellations” on the theme of “relative autonomy”. (A dig at Althusserians.) Samuel pointed out that, like ‘any other intellectual artefact’, theory isn’t timeless but ‘has its material and ideological conditions of existence’. But he wasn’t entirely a sceptic, arguing that good history required a ‘theoretically informed’ understanding of language, and that socialism required a serious analysis of ‘bourgeois ideology’.[5]

The dispute between E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall was not merely an academic quarrel about sources or style. It expresses two antagonistic tendencies in the British left: Thompson’s historical‑materialist, class‑formation method, which locates class consciousness in concrete economic relations, struggles and political experience, and Hall’s culturalist turn, which relocates political explanation in culture, identity and “articulations” of meaning.

Contemporary relevance

Samuel’s method of reconstructing working-class experience: oral histories, rank-and-file reportage, and cultural memory are weapons against ideological amnesia. Culture can strengthen class identity, but without a program that explains how capital reproduces itself, and without organisation to transform class interests into political power, cultural mobilisation risks becoming either reformist co‑optation or nostalgic particularism. The dialectic here is crucial: cultural consciousness both expresses and shapes class struggle, but it is itself transformed by objective changes in production and by political leadership.

From the standpoint of classical Marxism, Raphael Samuel’s recovery of popular memory is an essential resource—but it must be subordinated to a revolutionary program. Marxist historiography does not merely collect fragments of working‑class life; it explains how those fragments arise from class relations and how they can be mobilised for socialist transformation. This rejects both bourgeois culturalism, which divorces culture from economics, and reformist populism, which equates cultural recognition with systemic change.

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[1] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time

[2] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html

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

[4] Why Raphael Samuel Matters-https://jacobin.com/2024/05/raphael-samuel-workshop-of-the-world

[5] Ladders last a long time-www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/ladders-last-a-long-time 

On the surface of things, Caleb Maupin and Gerry Healy represent historically two very different political tendencies. Still, a serious study of both would reveal similar class tendencies. Despite Maupin and Healy occupying very different places in the history of the left, they share a common dynamic: both exhibited expressions of petty-bourgeois accommodation to capitalism and both substituted nationalist or sectarian shortcuts for the independent mobilisation of the international working class.

A Marxist myself, it does loathe me to mention both in the same breath, but the contrast is important. Healy was a historically prominent Trotskyist who, in practice, degenerated; Maupin is a contemporary promoter of “patriotic” or national-populist socialism. Both in the end show the objective danger posed by petty-bourgeois radicalism and political opportunism in periods of capitalist crisis.

Gerry Healy was a central figure in mid-20th-century Trotskyism. An organiser who, in earlier decades, defended the Fourth International against Pabloite liquidationists. But the record of the 1970s–1980s shows a political, organisational and moral degeneration along with an increasing turn to opportunist relations with bourgeois nationalist forces, theoretical confusions that substituted Hegelian mystification for Marxist historical materialism, and organisational practices that isolated and bureaucratized the WRP. The International Committee of the Fourth International undertook a systematic Marxist analysis of this degeneration, culminating in Healy’s expulsion in 1985. The document explained that personal abuses and scandals were rooted in a deeper political betrayal: the abandonment of Trotskyist program, dialectical method, and international proletarian strategy.[1]

Whether Maupin knew about this history or even cares is open for conjecture. His book contains no direct quotes from books or documents from that period, and there is no bibliography or footnotes. There appears to be no consultation of the most important biography of Healy, by David North.[2]

For North Gerry Healy’s life must be understood not as the product of individual psychology alone, but as the interaction of his political capacities with the shifting material conditions and class struggles of his era. From a Marxist and dialectical perspective, North argues that Healy’s later trajectory cannot be reduced to personal vice alone. Instead, it reflected objective pressures and incorrect political responses. Also, a turn toward nationalist and opportunist relations with bourgeois regimes, the subordination of programmatic tasks to short‑term organisational growth, and a growing separation of theory from the historical materialist method. These tendencies were epitomised in Healy’s ideological retreat, most notably in his distortion of dialectical materialism in his writings and practices, which North critiqued, and in his unprincipled alliances that compromised Trotskyist independence.

Maupin, despite pretending to defend the Fourth International or Leon Trotsky, repeats numerous old slanders, such as the claim that Leon Trotsky collaborated with capitalist governments against the Soviet Union. Maupin Writes

“Trotsky held onto the notion of the USSR as a “workers’ state” that needed to have the “parasitical Stalinist bureaucracy” removed. Trotsky was perhaps holding out for the “political revolution” he called for that would install him in Stalin’s position. Several Soviet leaders were convicted of allegedly conspiring with Trotsky, as well as Germany and Japan, to make this happen. Investigating evidence of these charges—routinely dismissed by Western historians as fabrications from Stalin—has been the focus of Dr Grover Furr of Montclair State University. Furr maintains that Trotsky was indeed guilty of such a conspiracy, and the response to Furr’s work has generally been limited to finger-pointing and ridicule, rather than serious analysis of the evidence Furr presents.”[3]

Furr’s work attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to cast Trotsky as an unreliable or dishonest historian. Variants of this argument range from minimising the scale of Stalinist repression to asserting that many well-established facts about the Moscow Trials, show trials, and mass terror are fabrications or grossly exaggerated. Politically, this disgusting apologist serves to blur the essential distinction that Marxists must draw between the proletarian revolution (and its leadership in 1917–23) and the bureaucratic counter-revolution that produced Stalinism. Furr’s books are published by the TKP, which is the sister party of the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE). This pseudo-historian reproduces all the old Stalinist lies of the 1930s.

It must be said that even after a hard study of Maupin’s book, it is difficult to understand what exactly Maupin defends in Healy. That is, until one gets to the end of the book. Maupin, throughout his political career, has defended every bourgeois nationalist dictator on the planet. His hero, like Healy at the end, is Colonel Gaddafi. Maupin defends Healy’s treacherous collaboration with the bourgeois nationalist.

Despite Healy’s capitulation to Pabloite opportunism and his despicable personal conduct in his treatment of female cadres, Maupin sees Healy doing very little wrong. If he did bad things, this was not the result of a political betrayal or adaptation to hostile class forces. Still, individual misconduct and organisational corruption do not take place in a vacuum. They are rooted in political orientations and class alignments. Healy’s petty-bourgeois turn eroded links with the working class and led to the surrender of programmatic principles in pursuit of short-term gains.

According to the analysis made in the document How the WRP Betrayed Trotskyism:” The Party was divided into an ‘Upstairs’—a coterie of exalted individuals around Healy—and a ‘Downstairs’ occupied by hundreds of rank and file members who were denied any role in the decision-making process and took orders. This created within the Party a whole series of destructive political relations. The leadership grew increasingly impervious to the real relations between the Party and the workers amid class struggle.

Contact between the Centre and the WRP branches assumed a purely administrative character, not unlike that between a local business franchise and the head office. Healy himself became a remote figure whom most members did not even know—and he knew very little about them. His trips to Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Tripoli were undoubtedly far more frequent than his visits to Glasgow, Sheffield, Manchester and Cardiff.

Healy’s high-flying diplomacy and his sudden access to vast material resources, based largely on his opportunist utilisation of Vanessa Redgrave as the WRP’s calling card in the Middle East, had a corrosive effect on the Party’s political line and its relation to the working class. Whatever its original intention, it became part of a process through which the WRP became the political captive of alien class forces.

At the very point when it was most in need of a course correction, the “success” of its work in the Middle East, which from the beginning lacked a basic proletarian reference point, made it less and less dependent upon the penetration of the working class in Britain and internationally. The close and intimate connection with the British and international working class that the WRP had developed over decades of struggle for Trotskyist principles was steadily undermined. The isolation from the working class grew in direct proportion to the abandonment of these principles.[4]

Caleb Maupin: A petty‑bourgeois nationalist

Caleb Maupin, while identifying completely with WRP’s historical love affair with bourgeois nationalism, is hostile to genuine Trotskyist internationalism. His contemporary politics, a public promotion of “patriotic socialism,” alliances with nationalist currents, and accommodation to reactionary forces constitute a modern variant of the same petty-bourgeois opportunistic tendencies as the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Maupin, like Healy, sought alliances with national-bourgeois forces and capitulated to non-proletarian class forces. Maupin purposely fuses socialist language with nationalist, conspiratorial, or reactionary currents (the so-called “red‑brown” tendency), repudiating the internationalist, working-class orientation that is the essence of Marxism.

It is therefore clear why Maupin is so enamoured with Healy and the so-called “cult of Personality”; his  Red‑brown movement adores the cult of personality, opportunist sectarianism, and the dilution of theory into sectarian or conspiratorial rhetoric.

Aidan Beaty-A Class Brother

Maupin spends a considerable amount of space in his short 81-page polemic attacking Aidan Beaty’s hack work on Healy.[5] Beaty is a petit‑bourgeois academic and a Pseudo-Left. His book on Healy was not just a private dispute but a politically signalled intervention in the larger struggle over the legacy and continuity of Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

As David North points out, “ Professor Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism is a malicious piece of political hack work posturing as a biography. The book discredits its author and fails to meet the standards expected of a scholarly work. The book is nothing of the sort. Beatty has produced a crude diatribe against Trotskyism and its historic efforts to construct a revolutionary party rooted in Marxist theory and based on the working class.”[6]

Maupin and Beaty, it must be said, share similar class backgrounds. Red‑brown populists like Maupin and sensationalist academics like Beatty serve to disorient workers and youth. The former does so by offering nationalist, authoritarian or conspiratorial alternatives; the latter by discrediting Trotskyist organisational forms and the necessity of a revolutionary party without providing a constructive program for the working class.

Maupin’s defence of Gerry Healy barely rises above A-level standard biographical history. And even that is being generous. While not entirely a hack job, it lifts no dead dogs in Healy’s political memory. However, Maupin’s book does raise concrete political issues: how a writer or historian treats theory and the written record. Maupin’s book contains barely 81 pages, of which only 50 were given over to a defence of Healy.

There is not a single quote or reference to Healy’s work. There is no examination of other work or archives mined, and no study of internal documents. A systematic study of Books, pamphlets, press archives, and internal documents is the material basis by which a writer transmits ideas to the general reader, and  Maupin does none of that.

The political crisis of the WRP in the 1970s–1980s was not an abstract intellectual dispute but the product of objective pressures: crisis in recruitment, the lure of external funds and nationalist alliances, and the isolation of a leadership that increasingly substituted personal discretion for collective Marxist leadership. In these conditions, practices around written materials — what was printed in party publications, what internal documents were circulated, and how theory was annotated or hidden — became instruments of political control rather than tools of education and criticism. Any half-decent writer or historian would have to make something of this history. Did Maupin know that Healy, like many revolutionaries, made substantial markings in books from his prodigious library?

“Marking” books can take many forms: literal physical annotation (underlining, marginal notes, censorship stamps), classification as “approved” or “banned” within a party press/bookshop, editorial rewriting, or the selective destruction/withholding of documents. Under Healy’s apparatus, these practices were embedded in a wider method: concentrating control over publications and the paper, using the press as an instrument of leadership rather than as a forum for workers’ study and democratic debate.

What a writer deliberately leaves out of a book is not merely a cultural injury; it destroys readers’ ability to educate themselves, develop independent working-class perspectives, and engage in collective theoretical struggle.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its sections produced a sustained investigation of the degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Gerry Healy. That record documents concrete, physical, and administrative methods used by the leadership to mark, censor, conceal, and control books, archives, and internal documents — measures deployed to defend an increasingly opportunist, petty-bourgeois leadership against internal dissent and international oversight.

One of the worst crimes committed by the leadership of the WRP was the removal and sale (or attempted sale) of the movement archives. But for the intervention of the ICFI, the WRP leadership would have sold off much of the movement’s archives and documents to the highest bidder. It is still a mystery where most of this archive ended up.

As recently as 2025, Vanessa Redgrave, one of Healy’s closest supporters, attempted to sell off Healy’s vast library. She was turned down by the British Socialist Workers Party, who, in the end, got the books for free and sold them in their shop to the highest bidder. Maupin’s silence on these matters of historical importance is deafening.

.

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[1] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html

[2] Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International Paperback – 1 Dec. 1991 Mehring Books

[3] Book Excerpt: “Why Demonize Gerry Healy in 2024?” http://www.cpiusa.org/news/book-excerpt-why-demonize-gerry-healy-in-2024

[4] www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html

[5] The Party is Always Right The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism by Aidan Beatty

[6] Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html

“As a general proposition: Social advances and changes of periods are brought about by virtue of the progress of women towards liberty, and the decadences of the social order are brought about by virtue of the decrease of liberty of women.

Charles Fourier on “the progress of women”

Women’s freedom is the sign of social freedom.

 ―Rosa Luxemburg

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

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

This new book, Breaking Our Chains—Women, Marxism and the Path to Liberation, written by Sarah Bates, Judy Cox and Sally Campbell, is a feminist-Marxist polemic or, as the authors state, a manifesto that examines women’s oppression as a historically specific phenomenon rooted in class society.

The authors present a materialist conception of history, which insists that the emancipation of women cannot be separated from the struggle to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. This article situates the book within classical Marxist theory, traces its historical-material logic, assesses its contemporary relevance, and contrasts its outlook with reformist and bourgeois feminist tendencies.

As Judy Cox states, “ it is important to stand with all those who want to fight back against sexism. But strategies do matter. I remember being told that we were all equal now and we didn’t need to worry about sexism anymore. We were told that the key was a few women winning individual success who would then “feminise” or “humanise” the boardroom.

These ideas have proved to be disastrously wrong. Lots of people are attracted to Marxism, but they think it needs adding to or building on to explain women’s oppression properly. I am absolutely for developing Marxism to address new ways of thinking about the world. But actually, I think Marxism, when it is properly understood, can explain the world and point to effective strategies for change. So, I welcome any engagement with Marxism, but I think Marxism is the theory of women’s liberation. We see women’s liberation as inextricably linked to the overthrow of capitalism.[1]

At the book’s heart is the application of the dialectical materialist method. The authors trace how social reproduction, the sexual division of labour, property relations and the state interpenetrate to produce gender hierarchies. Classical Marxism views ideas about gender not as timeless truths but as expressions of concrete class relations and material interests. The authors therefore locate patriarchy’s deepest roots in private property, commodity production and the wage system—showing how ideological forms (sexism, “tradition”, cultural myths) mediate and naturalise material inequalities.

Collectively, the authors situate women’s oppression within several distinct formations: precapitalist patriarchies, the rise of capitalist private property, and the modern wage-labour system. Historically specific institutions like household labour, unequal access to independent means of production, and the monetary valuation of labour have shaped the content and limits of women’s social power. The book charts how reformist struggles (suffrage, workplace protections, social-welfare reforms) have won partial gains but have been repeatedly constrained or reversed because they do not alter underlying class relations.

Marxism treats the question of women’s oppression not as a moral add-on but as an integral moment of class society. The materialist conception of history shows that family structures, gender relations and the legal status of women are rooted in modes of production: how people make their living shapes social relations, property, law and ideology.

As Frederick Engels argued, “We must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too.”[2]

The book is not just an examination of past liberation movements and struggles; it also has contemporary relevance. Today, intensified economic poverty, neoliberal austerity, the casualisation of labour, and the rollback of public services have further commodified and privatised social reproduction. The book explains why these trends disproportionately impact women: cuts in social care and public provision shift unpaid labour back into households; precarious employment deepens women’s dependency and vulnerability. It therefore argues that feminism divorced from class struggle can be absorbed as a market-friendly ideology or reduced to identity-based bargaining within capitalism.

The authors are correct in their insistence that real emancipation requires linking demands around wages, workplace democracy, social provision, childcare, reproductive rights and an end to militarism to a program to abolish wage labour and capitalist property—i.e., to socialist transformation. All women’s organisations must be rooted in the working class, not subordinated to bourgeois parties or union bureaucracies that manage capital’s interests. That perspective distinguishes genuine Marxist-feminism from reformist “management-of-inequality” approaches and the bourgeois “lean-in” model that leaves hierarchical structures intact.

To sum up, Breaking Our Chains provides a necessary corrective to bourgeois and reformist versions of feminism by grounding the fight for women’s liberation in Marxist historical materialism. Its central lesson: the liberation of women requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist social relations and the building of working-class political independence and international organisation. Women’s liberation is not attainable as a partial reform of capitalism. It requires the collective political mobilisation of the working class to overturn the property relations that underlie gender oppression and to build democratic, social institutions that free labour from private, unpaid burdens.  For students and activists seeking a theoretical and practical guide, the book underscores that only by combining rigorous theory, mass organisation and revolutionary strategy can genuine, lasting emancipation be achieved.

One major criticism of both the authors and the Socialist Workers Party that they belong to is that, despite the occasional publication of books that adopt a classical Marxist standpoint with references and quotes from Marxist revolutionaries Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, they usually offer a platform for the flotsam and jetsam of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of capitalism’s power and longevity and is hostile to the working class and to genuine socialism. The SWP’s sole purpose is to oppose the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. 

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[1] Breaking Our Chains: Smashing sexism and the system-socialistworker.co.uk/womens-liberation/breaking-our-chains-smashing-sexism-and-the-system/

[2] The Condition of the Working Class in England. Friedrich Engels 1845

Andrea Long Chu’s 2019 book, Females, is not an easy read. One’s reading pleasure is not helped by the fact that Chu is a walking and talking provocation. Her book, a short essay of barely 100 pages, is a paean to Valerie Solanas, a bizarre figure of the 1960s. In 1965, Solanas began writing the SCUM Manifesto, a pamphlet whose argument was that nearly every form of social wretchedness, from war, poverty and work, is directly related to men’s drive to hide their social and biological mediocrity. The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) was published in 1967 as a polemical essay written in the form of an extreme, satirical call for the overthrow of male-dominated society. It mixes bitter personal denunciation, provocation and anarchic rhetoric.

Andrea Long Chu’s Females is a polemical intervention in contemporary debates about sex, gender, and desire. It also advances provocative claims about gender as desire, about the social meanings attached to “female” and “male,” and about the politics of gender transition and identification. Chu frames the book as a polemic. She believes that gender is, first and foremost, a matter of desire. She challenges liberal and academic categories (identity as a social role or cognitive self-definition) and treats “females” as desired as such, or as desired by desiring to be such. The tone is literary, aphoristic and intentionally provocative.

There is nothing wrong with the polemical form that can clarify. But when it substitutes rhetorical flair for systematic analysis, it risks leaving political questions unanswered: what class interests are served by particular ideas? What organising program follows from a claim about desire?

Andrea Long Chu’s Females is a polemical intervention in contemporary debates about sex, gender, and desire. It advances provocative claims about gender as desire, about the social meanings attached to “female” and “male,” and about the politics of gender transition and identification. The book, at best, should be seen as opening up a conversation. Still, it should be approached as a theoretical and literary provocation that intersects with questions of identity, social reproduction and cultural authority.

Its tone is deliberately shocking; it advocates the abolition of male authority and, in parts, violent and exclusionary measures against men. Published in 2019, Historically, it has often been read as an expression of radical, petty‑bourgeois feminism and cultural nihilism rather than as a program for socialist transformation. It should be noted that Solanes acted out the logic of her argument in 1968, when she shot artist Andy Warhol. She pleaded guilty to attempted murder by reason of insanity and was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for three years after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. It is hoped that Chu does not follow in her idol’s footsteps.

Chu’s petty‑bourgeois subjectivity and voluntarism echo the Scum Manifesto’s individualism, moral denunciation, and moralistic remedies. Chu’s thinking starts from the premise of subjective privileging of desire over social reproduction. A Marxist method begins from the primacy of social being: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social being that determines their consciousness”.  Sex and gender under capitalism are rooted in relations of production, the division of labour, and the social reproduction of labour power, and are not reducible to individual desire.

Chu’s political thinking mirrors the tendencies that the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky identified and fought against in the late 1930s—eclecticism and petty‑bourgeois opposition to capitalism that replaced scientific analysis with moralising and substituted voluntarist acts for organised class strategy.

Trotsky warned that rejection of dialectical materialism leads to political confusion and opportunism, writing, “Vulgar thought operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc., as fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism, morals are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state.

The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisations, a richness of content and flexibility; I would say even a succulence which, to a certain extent, brings them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.”[1]

Chu treats desire and aesthetics as primary causal forces. She wholeheartedly rejects the materialist analysis that situates erotic norms within capitalist social relations. The founder of Russian Marxism, G. Plekhanov’s dialectical critique of idealism warned against elevating inward “notions” above concrete social relations, writing “The utopian socialists regarded ‘human nature’ from an abstract point of view and appraised social phenomena in accordance with the formula ‘Yes is yes, and no is no.” Property either was or was not conformable to human nature; the monogamic family was or was not conformable to human nature; and so on. Regarding human nature as unchangeable, utopian socialists were justified in hoping that, among all possible systems of social organisation, there must be one which was more conformable than any other to that nature. Hence their wish to discover this best of all possible systems, the one most conformable to human nature.

Every founder of a school believed he had discovered it, which is why he advocated adopting his particular utopia. Mars introduced the dialectical method into socialism, thus making socialism a science and giving the death blow to utopianism. Marx does not appeal to human nature; he does not know of any social institutions that conform to it or do not. Already in his Misère de la Philosophie, we find this significant and characteristic criticism of Proudhon: “Monsieur Proudhon is unaware that history in its entirety is nothing other than a continuous modification of human nature.” (Misère de la Philosophie, Paris, 1896, p. 204).[2]

One of Chu’s more controversial claims is that trans identity and transition are intelligible as responses to desire and to the aesthetic, or, to put it another way, the calculation of gender. She treats the surgical transition and identification as a trans as acts shaped by the logic of wanting to be read or valued as a particular gender. Her reduction of transition to an aesthetic desire risks erasing the material conditions that compel or enable transitions—such as access to medical care, labour market pressures, policing and workplace vulnerability.  

To summarise, Chu’s work is culturally resonant because it exposes real anger against patriarchy, but Chu is not a Marxist or even close to one. Her books and essays, instead of challenging the capitalist system, channel it in ways that can fragment working‑class solidarity. The contemporary task is to understand gender oppression as bound up with capitalist property relations and state power.

Chu often prefers paradox, aphorism and literary provocation over systematic argument. She uses paradox to unsettle both mainstream feminism and trans‑affirming orthodoxy. Her thrust, if you pardon the pun, is toward rethinking gender as situated primarily in desire and aesthetic valuation, leaving open complex ethical and political implications rather than prescribing collective programs.

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[1] The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (December 1939) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

[2] Dialectic and Logic-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/xx/dialectic.htm