“ A Libel Against Humanity”

David Walsh

‘The Satan of our cosmology is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that everything is running down. Life is … a local contradiction of this law … [it] refuses to submit … and rewinds itself up again.’

William Golding

Anyone who moved through those years, without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

Wiliam Golding

Lord of the Flies, written in the aftermath of the Second World War, is essentially a “libel against humanity”. The book’s plot line follows a group of largely public schoolboys who descend into savagery at the drop of a hat after being stranded on a deserted island.  While Golding argues that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey,” he rejects the premise that the boys’ behaviour could be socially constructed. Golding believes violence is a default setting of humanity and not a condition of the competitive, capitalist and class-divided society in which the boys were raised.

A class analysis would indicate that Ralph and Piggy are members of the ruling elite representing the liberal-democratic order and that both exhibit “bourgeois” values. Jack would be the totalitarian/militarist, portraying the rise of fascism or the expression of Stalinism, valuing strength and production (meat) over intellectualism and law.

Piggy’s alienation and death could be explained by his lower-class status (indicated by his accent and physical limitations), showing that an irrational” democratic system fails to protect those it deems inferior.  Golding believed that it would not take much for civilisation after the Second World War to suffer the same fate as the boys. A Marxist would argue that the novel reflects the “political subconscious” of the Cold War era, in which the fear of nuclear war and the struggle between democracy and communism are projected onto the children’s conflict.

As Alexander Lee points out in a recent article, Golding’s postwar irrational vulnerabilities were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which had already pointed to a dystopian future in which rationalism and science run amok, destroying morality. In 1941, a Mass Observation Report found that a majority of British people believed that science was ‘out of control’.

Such was the toxic atmosphere created by the post-war period, by the American state and ruling class when they carried out a purge of socialist and left-wing views from film, writing and culture as a whole. Golding’s opinions, as presented in Lord of the Flies (1954), which present violence and atavism as central to the human condition, were already being expressed by other writers during this period.

However, William Golding’s novels are not merely literary artefacts; read dialectically, they are tools for political education—revealing how ideas, institutions and everyday relations reproduce domination, and pointing to why only organised working-class struggle can overturn the conditions that give rise to the very tragedies he depicts.

David North puts this better when he says, “Most of you are, I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argues that barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation and they will, within a few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war. It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third Reich after 1945 than before. In the reactionary political environment of the Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern capitalism.”[1]

In his defence, Golding was not born a pessimist or prone to irrationality. According to Alexander Lee, “Long before Golding began writing Lord of the Flies, he had also been a rationalist. The son of a science teacher, he studied Natural Sciences at Oxford before switching to English. He grew up believing that humanity was not only capable of change but also progressing. Like many students in the 1920s and 1930s, he agreed with Karl Marx that history moves in one direction: forward. He believed that, even if the process might sometimes be painful, even violent, the conditions of life would inexorably improve and humanity become happier, more ‘enlightened’, and fulfilled. It was inevitable.”[2]

So what changed? What made Golding write ‘We are the masters of ignorance, proud, frightened, and god-haunted. We have no country and no home.’ We are no better than before: worse, in fact. Death has become a calculation, and even cruelty has lost its horror. It might be tempting to compare this to the ‘law of the jungle’, but even that would be an understatement. In what jungle could you find six million people being processed through a death chamber?’[3]

Again, Golding was not the only writer to draw pessimistic conclusions from the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the murder of six million jews. Walter Benjamin’s famous “Angelus Novus”‑inspired lament saw history as an accumulating catastrophe rather than a process moving toward emancipation; Benjamin’s own despair culminated in suicide while fleeing fascism, a tragic personal witness to the collapse of political possibilities. Others turned to cultural nihilism or moral relativism—treating the Holocaust as proof that Enlightenment rationality and historical materialism were bankrupt. In his book Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, Enzo Traverso makes clear his deepening opposition to Marxism as a method of historical analysis and as the basis of a political perspective.

In the introduction, he writes: “Between emancipation and genocide, the history of European Jewry, as much in its metamorphoses as in its wounds, can be seen as an excellent laboratory in which to study the different faces of modernity: its hopes and liberatory aspirations on the one hand, its destructive forces on the other. This history shows both the ambiguity of the Enlightenment and its heirs, including Marxism, and the extreme forms of barbarism that modern civilisation can take.”

The Marxist writer Nick Beams replied, saying, “This approach, in which ‘modernity’ is made responsible for the crimes against the Jewish people—one could say the crimes against humanity committed on the body of the Jewish people—performs a vital political role. It obscures the political forces and the social classes whose interests they ultimately served. Modernity is an empty abstraction. It is wracked by class division and class conflict.”[4]

While Golding’s and others’ approach is psychologically understandable, this thinking depoliticises the lesson of Auschwitz. It turns the Holocaust into an argument that history has no laws or that socialism is an inadequate response and substitutes metaphysical despair for political struggle. As the World Socialist Web Site has argued, attempts to attribute Auschwitz to amorphous “modernity” rather than to specific class and imperialist dynamics serve to blur responsibility and paralyse resistance.

Since some of the article was written with the help of the WSWS’s Socialism AI, it would be churlish of me not to praise it, and to say that it has already become an invaluable educational tool in the struggle for socialism. One aspect I am particularly struck by is that it not only provides information but also offers a Marxist study guide. It provides a systematic framework for studying Golding’s book to inform both a theoretical understanding and aid political development.

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

[2] William Golding’s Island of Savagery Alexander Lee | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 12 December 2025

[3] William Golding’s Island of Savagery

[4] Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html

When the wicked rule, the people groan.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. …

– Book of Proverbs 29:2 and 18 (written before 700 BCE

Socialist World Media, the online media platform for the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), recently published a fascinating article called “The Man Trotsky”.[1]

This was published on December 14, 2025. It was initially written by the State Capitalist Rae Spiegel (later known as Raya Dunayevskaya) when she was  22 years old. Spiegel served as Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary in Mexico. It was submitted to Max Shachtman for publication in the press of the newly formed Workers Party, but it was never printed.

The piece offers a rare, intimate look at Trotsky’s personality and his vision for a socialist future. The article is well worth a read despite her glorification of the GPU and FBI agent Joseph Hansen.

Given that the article offers fascinating insight into how Leon Trotsky worked, one wonders how he would have responded to the new WSWS Socialism AI platform. My feeling is that he would have welcomed it with open arms and would have had a field day on it. This was my initial reaction to it. I still need more time to develop a deeper understanding of it and its technology, but it appears to be a fantastic aid in the fight for Socialism in the 21^st century.

Socialism AI is a specialised chatbot designed to provide workers, students, and activists with access to over 175 years of Marxist theory and nearly 30 years of WSWS historical analysis. It should be seen as a library for the mind, with a fantastic librarian at the helm.

Users can pose questions about historical events, political theory, and current labour struggles (e.g., how to oppose layoffs at specific companies) and receive responses grounded in scientific socialism. While being a little surprised that some features require a paid subscription to cover operational costs, I agree with the initiative to “democratize access” to revolutionary perspectives.

As David North points out, “The historical significance of Socialism AI is sharply revealed when examined in the objective context of its public launch, amid the deepening world capitalist crisis. The working class faces a highly complex economic, geopolitical and social reality, while the bourgeoisie has thoroughly dismantled traditional centres of study and discussion. Under these circumstances, a system that synthesises and connects the insights of Marxist theory with current developments is no mere novelty. It is a means of intellectual counter-attack, of recovering the historical memory of the working-class movement.”[2]

North’s point about recovering the memory of the working class is extremely valid. This has always been the attitude of the Marxist movement, but the development of Socialism AI takes it to a whole other level. This change in how the Marxist movement operates, while not as fundamental as the shift from the Newspaper form to the Internet, is pretty close to that fundamental change. While not a replacement for the World Socialist Website (WSWS), it should be seen as a complement to it.

It has not taken the Pseudo Left fraternity long to start attacking the WSWS’s use of AI for revolutionary purposes. On a forum run by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, titled “WSWS group to launch a ‘Socialism AI’,” the SPGB published several unopposed comments that broadly attacked the WSWS’s launch of Socialism AI and expressed hostility to both orthodox Marxism and AI in general.[3]

The WSWS recently published an attack by “Dmitri. The WSWS has issued an extensive reply to his short comments, saying “ Dmitri’s remarks, notwithstanding his use of technical jargon, exemplify the widespread lack of understanding of AI and hostility to the Marxist approach to technology within the milieu of middle-class radicalism.”[4]

Socialist AI is fit for purpose, and workers and students should embrace the concept behind Socialism AI and use it in their struggle for Socialism in the 21^st Century.

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[1] https://www.socialistworld.net/2025/12/14/the-man-trotsky/

[2] Technology and the working class: Responding to an opponent of Socialism AI http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/19/thbn-d19.html

[3] www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/wsws-group-to-launch-a-socialism-ai/

[4] Technology and the working class: Responding to an opponent of Socialism AI -www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/19/thbn-d19.html 

 ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive,‘

Walter Scott- Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601), Act 1, sc. 3, l 58

Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!

William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1′ (1597), Act 5, sc. 4, l [148]

“Tell me anyway – Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

— Leon Trotsky

“The New Left Party: Seize the Time” is the title of a pamphlet by Charlie Kimber and Tomáš Tengely-Evans, published by the Socialist Worker. This new left party is called Your party, but no matter how the writers from the SWP dress it up, it is nothing but a Labour Party mark 2 and a political trap for the working class that is moving significantly to the left.

The reality is that “Your Party” is a “pseudo-left” and reformist project that will ultimately lead to “betrayal and defeat” for the working class. One indicator among many of that political trap is that the orthodox Trotskyists from the World Socialist website (WSWS) were explicitly barred from attending Your Party’s founding conference, which it condemned as an act of “targeted political exclusion” and “bureaucratic censorship”.

The founding of the party signals the “dead-end pseudo-reformist politics” that seek to work within the existing capitalist system rather than overthrow it. It deserves its title as a “Labour Party Mark 2”.

The WSWS criticised Your Party’s “policy statement” as a collection of “sound bites committing the party to nothing”. It stresses that genuine socialism requires the “conscious revolutionary mobilisation of the working class to overthrow the capitalist state and establish workers’ power”, which Your Party avoids. The  WSWS contends that Your Party’s leaders, including Corbyn and Sultana, will eventually “betray and defeat” the working class, similar to other “pseudo-left” figures like Bernie Sanders or Yanis Varoufakis.

Despite Kimber et al saying that the lessons from other attempts across Europe to form a series of new left parties must be learnt, the reality is that the SWP supported these attempts, dressing them up as socialist organisations that would lead a struggle against capitalism. They did nothing of the sort, and like Your Party, they are and were a political trap for the working class. The most recent of these traps is the SWP’s promotion of Zohran Mamdani. The SWP said of Mamdani’s campaign, “An insurgent vision that breaks with the status quo can be popular. That’s the lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York. And it’s a lesson that Your Party could learn here in Britain.”

As the WSWS writes, “The experience of the past decade is replete with examples of parties and individuals whose claims to represent a radical break with the political establishment were shipwrecked on the realities of capitalist rule. In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) came to power in 2015, promising to end austerity, only to impose the most brutal social cuts at the dictates of the banks and the European Union. In Germany, Die Linke (Left Party) has participated in state governments that deport refugees and enforce austerity. In Britain, the Corbyn movement within the Labour Party capitulated to the right-wing establishment, paving the way for the return of open reaction. In class terms, these tendencies express not the interests of the working class but those of the upper-middle class—a privileged social layer seeking not a fundamental restructuring of society but a more comfortable position for themselves.”[1]

It has become pretty clear from the founding conference what type of organisation Your Party will be. What Pseudo Lefts were allowed into the hall were treated like dirt. As Laura Tiernan from the WSWS reports, “The SWP’s Samira Ali was physically removed from the conference venue by security guards who confirmed they were acting on the orders of Corbyn’s former chief of staff, Karie Murphy. The SWP’s Stand Up to Racism stall was dismantled. If this is how YP’s leadership treats loyal critics like the SWP, how would they respond in government to striking workers or to mass popular opposition to austerity and war?”

Mark Serwotka

The right-wing trajectory of Your Party was further expressed by a former ally of the Socialist Workers Party, Mark Serwotka. Serwotka is a leading member of Your Party. The SWP trumpeted Serwotka as a new breed of left-wing union leader leading a struggle against capitalism and Labourism.

Despite Serwotka’s reputation as a left-wing, militant union leader, the reality is a little different. Serwotka and the PCS leadership have been “stifling action” and have failed to mount a serious challenge to government austerity measures and pay restraints. Serwotka has been incorporated into the Establishment, and pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Alliance and Respect and the SWP give him a left cover and serve as a “safety valve” to contain working-class anger.

Serwotka writing in the Stalinist Morning Star wrote “We are not building a vanguard party — if we are not going to be the Labour party mark two, we’re not going to be the SWP or Socialist Party mark two either! We need to win the loyalty of millions, so we must emphasise a politics and campaigns that unite around people’s pressing material concerns, not the left’s factional, sectarian priorities. We cannot insist on ideological purity within our ranks — tolerance and acceptance of a variety of political views on the left is essential, including opinions about gender and sex, and a two-state solution.”[2]

The SWP and Trotskyism

While it is clear that the SWP has devoted considerable resources to the Your Party reformist bandwagon, it still maintains a Pseudo-Left usage of Marxists such as Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. They use these Marxists as a “calling card” to recruit members, particularly students, while ensuring that this nominal association never conflicts with its reformist objectives and certainly never advocates for genuine revolutionary change.

The use of a quote from the US Trotskyist leader James P Cannon is another calling card. This one is a little bizarre because Cannon and his party were once Trotskyists, and that is not the SWP’s political heritage. The SWP quote Cannon saying “that in every faction fight there is a reason—and then a real reason. Using Google’s AI mode, I was unable to track down this quote. I just used an old-fashioned approach, and it comes up as this article- Factional Struggle and Party Leadership.[3]It is hoped that when The World Socialist Website launch its own Socialism AI, it will be easier to find quotes such as the one above.

The speciality of the SWP is airbrushing key historical figures, like Trotsky, from their events, such as the “Marxism” festivals, to avoid serious political discussion. Tony Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.

Your Party is a political trap, and the SWP is complicit in this trap. The urgent task is to resolve the crisis of working-class leadership and to build a genuine mass socialist party that unites workers worldwide and completes the epoch of world socialist revolution that began in 1917.

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[1] The political and class issues in Mamdani’s victory in New York City-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/06/ygfl-n06.html

[2] A new left party is born — but can it break with old habits morningstaronline.co.uk/article/new-left-party-born-can-it-break-old-habits

[3] www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953/facstrug.htm

Date/Time: 2025-11-22 14:13:15

London

(This is an AI-generated summary of the above lecture using Plaud Note)

This lecture by David North interrogates the trajectory of the United States amid an accelerating political and constitutional crisis, situating it within a global breakdown of capitalist democracy and the rise of oligarchic rule. Framing the decisive question “Where is America going?” in both objective (material forces, economic relations) and subjective (mass consciousness and response) terms, North adopts Trotsky’s historical method of posing strategic questions during periods of acute class conflict. He characterises the U.S. situation as “going to hell in a handbasket,” highlighting the rapid tempo of destabilisation, including Donald Trump’s denunciations of Democratic legislators as “treasonous” and calls for capital punishment after they urged the military to refuse illegal orders violating constitutional oaths. He notes the intersection of political leadership with U.S. intelligence agencies, underscoring the contested nature of civil-military relations and the legality of such relations.

Expanding beyond immediate developments, North argues that the apparent authoritarian reconfiguration of American governance after the 2024 election reflects a terminal crisis of global capitalism, driven by extreme inequality, financialization, fictitious capital, debt expansion, and erosion of the dollar’s credibility. He employs historical analogies (France before 1789, Chile 1973, U.S. slavery-era measures) to depict oligarchic aggression and spectacle—billionaire-dominated policymaking, symbolic restorations of reactionary iconography, and conspicuous consumption within state institutions—as symptoms of direct oligarchic rule. Internationally, he traces parallels with Britain under Keir Starmer and other governments, arguing that similar structural pressures produce convergent authoritarian trajectories.

The lecture critiques reliance on moral appeals absent a scientific socialist program centred on the working class, contending that war, militarisation, and genocide are ruling-class countermeasures to capitalist contradictions. North analyses the Marxist foundations of value and surplus value, rising constant-to-variable capital ratios, and the falling rate of profit; he contends that AI-driven automation intensifies these contradictions by displacing living labour—the source of surplus value—while delivering uneven, limited productivity gains. He rejects reliance on rival capitalist states (China and Russia), emphasising internationalist working-class unity (including between Russian and Ukrainian workers) against imperialism and national chauvinism.

North advances a strategic orientation built on transitional demands—expropriation of capitalists, factory committees, nationalisation under democratic control—and the necessity of a vanguard party to develop socialist consciousness. He underscores the degeneration of bourgeois leadership and the crisis of revolutionary leadership, asserting that U.S. mass sentiment trends left despite betrayals by the pseudo-left. In practice, he calls for organising rank-and-file committees, restoring Marxism’s authority through education on 20th-century revolutions and betrayals, and deploying new tools such as “Socialism AI”—an application trained on the WSWS archive and Marxist literature—to scale outreach, provide programmatic clarity, and assist in organising working-class struggles. The event concludes with a call to join the Socialist Equality Party and to build an internationally coordinated movement capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions through conscious action.

Fascism] affects white and black people alike … The fight against fascism is a common fight for both of us; we approach it from two different directions and perspectives. We are the immediate victims. If they come for us in the morning, they will go for you that night. So be with us that morning, and we will be with you that night.

James Baldwin

The progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at other times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions or utilises those already existing to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat, several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it has remained politically divided. The problem of the united front, which arises during specific periods most sharply, originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists of winning over the majority of the proletariat, and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfil its mission except by preserving, entirely and unconditionally, its political and organisational independence apart from all other parties and organisations within and without the working class.

Leon Trotsky-Bureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)

Socialist Workers Party member Geoff Brown is the author of the new book A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League. The ANL was launched in November 1977 to counteract the growing threat from racists and fascists who were spurred on by sections of the ruling elite who saw the fascists as a battering ram against the increasing radicalisation of the working class.

As the 2010 statement by the Socialist Equality Party stated, “The global crisis plunged Britain into a period of intense class conflict, which brought it closer to revolution than at any time since the 1926 General Strike. As a major financial centre, it was especially vulnerable to the sweeping capital movements that occurred following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. The Wilson government was forced into a series of devaluations and major spending cuts. In 1969, it brought forward the White Paper, “In Place of Strife”, to enforce legal sanctions against strikes.

The orthodox Trotskyists in the Socialist Labour League (SLL) warned that the Labour left’s refusal to lead a struggle against Wilson was paving the way for the return of a Conservative government and the imposition of even more savage measures against the working class. In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet after delivering his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, which sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments. But Powell’s remarks were only the initial expression of a right-wing shift by the Tories, who, by 1970, had adopted a radical, free-market agenda. Based on the monetarist economic policies of Milton Friedman, they advocated an end to the “bailout” of inefficient companies, the curtailing of social provisions, and a legal offensive against wildcat strikes.[1]

It must be said from the outset that the formation of the ANL had nothing to do with Trotskyism or Leon Trotsky’s advocacy of the United Front. According to the SWP, the “ Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky conceived the idea of the united front, which unites groups that are very different, such as reformists and revolutionaries.”

What Trotsky wrote on the United Front is opposed to what the SWP did. He wrote, ‘In entering into agreements with other organisations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. If the reformists begin to put the brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we, as an independent organisation, always reserve the right to lead the struggle to its conclusion, and this without our temporary semi-allies. It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office, but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and allowing the latter to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of ‘rapprochement’ there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle….

“On the question of the united front, we see the very same passive and irresolute tendency, but this time masked by verbal irreconcilability. At the very first glance, one is hit between the eyes by the following paradox: the rightist party elements with their centrist and pacifist tendencies, who … come simultaneously to the forefront as the most irreconcilable opponents of the united front. … In contrast, those elements who have … held in the most difficult hours the position of the Third International are today in favour of the tactic of the united front. As a matter of fact, the mask of pseudo-revolutionary intransigence is now being assumed by the partisans of the dilatory and passive tactic”[2]

The SWP said it had “no secret agendas. What we say is what we do. We were running it as a united front. We couldn’t do anything that would undermine the agreement; we had a basic agreement that we were focusing on the NF.” Alongside Stalinists and reformists, the SWP had the backing of other pseudo-left parties that broadly supported the ANL, with the political scoundrel Tariq Ali writing “Hats Off to the SWP”

However, the real purpose of the SWP’s ANL United Front was to develop a pseudo-reformist alliance, aimed at deflecting a revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the British ruling elite. While from the outside the ANL was seen as an adjunct to the SWP, it was, in reality, directed by the top leadership, with SWP’s party leader, Tony Cliff, pulling the strings. Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.”[3]

The SWP’s perversion of the United Front tactic was also reflected in its work within the trade unions. As Paul Holborow relates, “one of the most significant considerations regarding how the ANL was established so quickly and widely as a grassroots organisation is what the SWP or the International Socialists had done industrially, particularly since the first miners’ strike in 1972 and before. Crucially, we had 22 rank-and-file papers that were an essential part of our industrial strategy for developing a rank-and-file movement that could fight independently of the trade union bureaucracy.5 This enabled us to very quickly establish sizeable groups of manual and white collar workers in their places of work—firefighters, car workers, civil servants, bus workers, dockers, teachers, engineers, council workers and many others. Perhaps the most impressive example of this was when miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and I spoke at a 200-strong delegate conference, and the following Monday, 60,000 Yorkshire miners went to work with the yellow ANL sticker on their helmets.”[4]

The purpose of the Socialist Workers Party’s rank-and-file committees, then as now, while providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, was to work might and main to politically block any independent movement of the working class. One problem for the pseudo-left groups is that they themselves now make up a significant faction of the trade union leadership at national, regional, and branch levels. They have been responsible for numerous betrayals and are now calling on rank-and-file members to rebel against the same bureaucracy to which they belong.

The publication of Brown’s book this year coincides with the SWP’s resurrection of the United Front campaign. According to Holborow, “When John McDonnell said last summer that we need to build an ANL-type movement, I think he was entirely right in spirit, but the context today is so different from what it was 40 years ago. Then, there was a militant rank-and-file movement. Britain was in turmoil, and the opposition to the ruling class was much more extensive and articulate. We are building in a completely different time, in the era of neoliberalism and all the ravages that this has produced for the labour movement. This makes it in many ways more necessary than ever to have an ANL-type organisation, but also more complicated.”[5]  In August, McDonnell had declared, “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”

This is the same McDonnell who, despite being expelled from the Labour Party by its right wing, grovelled before Starmer and begged for re-admittance to this right-wing party of big business. He wrote 11 op-eds in The Guardian, capitulating to Starmer and his right-wing allies. The SWP and its pseudo-left allies have offered him a means to resurrect his “left” reputation.

As Tony Robson and Chris Marsden point out, “There is, however, a significant difference between the 1970s and the present day. Whereas in 1977, the SWP acted with the benediction of the Labour and trade union lefts, today it speaks as the officially designated representative of the Trades Union Congress. The SWP has, over the decades, integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in several unions to complement the niche it has established within academia. It speaks today not merely as the bureaucracy’s apologist, but as its officially recognised spokesman on the left.”[6]

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[1] The mass movement against the Heath government-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/32.html

[2] Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, New York and London, 1953, pp. 91–96, 127–128].

[3] Tony Cliff-Trotskyism after Trotsky-www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1999/trotism/ch03.htm

[4] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/

[5] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/

[6] The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”

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

Tom Paine

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

John Rees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher Hill

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

Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity.

Georg Lukács’

“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.

Leon Trotsky

“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

“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Bertolt Brecht, referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)

Grand Hotel Abyss is a useful, if somewhat idiosyncratic, examination of the Frankfurt School. The founding of the school was in direct response to the failure and betrayal of the German revolution of 1918/23. Leon Trotsky posed the question :

“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923, the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.”[1]

The so-called “Marxist intellectuals”, centred around the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, drew extremely pessimistic conclusions from the defeat of the German revolution. To a man, they blamed the working class for the defeat, not the German Communist Party. As Jeffries puts it: “It was as if the proletariat had been found wanting and so had to be replaced as revolutionary agent by critical theorists.”[2]

Grand Hotel Abyss – takes its name from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács’s derisive term for the Frankfurt school :

“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied 1962, p. 219).

The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to his synthesis of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (e.g. cf. Philosophische Grundfragen I, Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins, Frankfurt 1961) does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and progressive opposition is stirring in the Western world (including the Federal Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of ‘left’ ethics with ‘right’ epistemology.”[3]

This book is a group biography. The early part of the book describes the origins of the school. From the very beginning, the school was financed heavily by sections of the German bourgeoisie. As Bertolt Brecht once quipped, “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,”. These financiers had such a significant influence on the institute that the words “Marxism” or “revolution” were not mentioned in the early papers issued by the institute’s members. It is fair to say that the Institute for Social Research was compromised from the start.

Economist Henryk Grossman dominated the school’s early work. As the Marxist writer Nick Beams explains “In 1929 Henryk Grossmann publication of his book The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System explained that it was the “great historical contribution” of Rosa Luxemburg that she adhered to the basic lesson of Capital and sought to prove that “the continued development of capitalism encounters absolute economic limits.” The problem with Luxemburg’s analysis, however, was that it shifted the crucial contradictions of capitalism from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation. “Realisation” was not the problem for the long-term development of capitalism. Rather, the problem was the insufficient extraction of surplus value to sustain capitalist accumulation, which expressed itself in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[4]

It is extraordinary that the Institute had little or no contact with the two main parties of the working the Social Democratic and Communist parties. Towards the end of the 1920s, the work of the institute came to be dominated by one of its leaders, Max Horkheimer.[5].

As Martin Jay writes “In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for scepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness.”

The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions, he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the course of economic processes…. In both parties, there exists a part of the strength on which the future of mankind depends.” At no time, therefore, whether under Grünberg or Horkheimer, was the Institute to ally itself with a specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterised its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms: “It is a neutral institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time, everything concerning the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered. Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and periodicals) … Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of the worker’s movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for it.[6]

Horkheimer was the father of “Critical Theory”. Most, if not all, leaders of the Institute, including  Adorno, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. Rolf Wiggerhaus writes “None of them [the leaders of the Frankfurt School] put any hopes in the working class…Adorno expressly denied that the working class had any progressive role to play.” (The Frankfurt School—Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, MIT Press, 1992, p. 123)

“The Frankfurt School transformed Marxism from a theoretical and political weapon of the proletarian class struggle into a form of supra-class cultural criticism, expressing the political pessimism, social alienation and personal frustration of sections of the middle classes. Max Horkheimer and his closest collaborator, Theodor Adorno, reverted to philosophical traditions that Marxism had opposed—the critical theory of Kant, the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians and various forms of philosophical subjectivism from Schopenhauer to Heidegger.

Traumatised by the experience of National Socialism, they denied the revolutionary potential of the working class. Contrary to Marx, in whose view the development of the productive forces blew apart capitalist property relations and unleashed an epoch of social revolution, in their opinion, the development of the productive forces plunged society into barbarism and solidified capitalist rule. “The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers, but the logical consequence of industrial society”, they claimed, and further: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression”. The only way out of this social dead end was critical thinking: “It is the servant which the master cannot control at will”. The revolutionary subject, therefore, according to these theorists, was the “enlightened individual” and not the proletariat.”[7]

This leads me to another leading member of the Institute, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, although a gifted writer, led a torturous life and committed suicide at an early age. He too succumbed to the pessimism of the age and, like his co-thinkers, opposed orthodox Marxism and wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force for the overthrow of capitalism.

Before his death, he wrote the following: “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.”[8]

As Bernd Rheinhardt writes “Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His situation was desperate, stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his 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.”

It is safe to say that Benjamin was not the only one of the Frankfurt School who had a pessimistic outlook stemming from an incorrect perspective regarding the rise of German fascism. The leading representatives of the Frankfurt School lived most of their adult lives in a state of political prostration.” The maestros of ‘critical theory’ and the “negative dialectic” were, when it came to political analysis, incompetent and perennially disoriented. The rise of fascism and defeats of the working class in the 1930s shattered whatever confidence they may have had at some time in the possibility of socialist revolution. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno—published in 1947 and generally considered the founding philosophical statement of the Frankfurt School—pronounced the downfall of all prospects for human progress.”

The analysis on the Frankfurt School by the Fourth International and particularly one of its leaders, David North, has come under sustained attack by several pseudo-left organisations and individuals, such as Javier-sethness who writes.

“In his “Marxist Critique” of The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, and The Politics of the Pseudo-Left, David North, a high-ranking member within the Trotskyist Fourth International, chairman of the U.S. Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and editor of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), reprints polemical essays (2003-2012) voicing the response of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the heterodox theoretical suggestions made by fellow travellers Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner to incorporate greater concern for psychology, utopia, gender, and sexuality into the ICFI’s program. Whereas Steiner and Brenner sought to open the Fourth International to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Wilhelm Reich’s sex-pol approach, North repudiates any such suggestion as beyond the pale and communicates his revulsion with the Frankfurt School as an alternative to Marxism-Leninism. To rationalise his dismissal of Critical Theory, he rather baselessly ties its legacy to the rise of postmodernist irrationalism. North essentially claims any left-wing intellectual “deviation” from the ICFI’s Trotskyism irredeemably to espouse “pseudo-left,” “petty bourgeois,” “anti-Marxist,” even “anti-socialist” politics. To sustain such fantasies, North presents a highly dishonest, even unhinged analysis of the Frankfurt School theorists and theories.”[9]

There is not much point in answering this facile argument, and doing so would only encourage further stupidity, and I am pretty sure North can defend himself against this infantile attack.

While Jeffries’ book is well researched and readable, it suffers from a major weakness. At no time does he examine what orthodox Marxists have said on the subject of the Frankfurt School. North’s book is not mentioned, and I doubt Jeffries has read any of the articles in it or, for that matter, contacted any leading writers from the World Socialist Website.

Also, the most important Marxist of the 20^th century, Leon Trotsky, gets no mention. Trotsky wrote numerous articles and pamphlets on Germany in the fire of events. The German edition of his writings on Germany, published in the 1970s, contains 76 articles written between 1929 and 1940, the overwhelming majority in 1932 and in 1933. Unlike members of the Frankfurt School, Trotsky aimed to change the course of the Communist Party. With a correct policy, this party would have been able to stop the rise of National Socialism and prevent Hitler’s victory.

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School — Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, Benjamin, Wellmer, Marcuse — were all for theorising capitalism and barbarism and thought little about changing it. The residents in the Grand Hotel Abyss were about theory, not action.

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[1] Trotsky, Leon, 1972, The First Five Years of the Communist International, Volume 1 (Monad Press), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/03/grand-hotel-abyss-frankfurt-school-adorno-benjamin-stuart-jeffries-review

[3] Preface to The Theory of the Novel- http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/theory-novel/preface.htm

[4] Marxism and the political economy of Paul Sweezy- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/04/ps3-a08.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer

[6] The Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung and Its First Frankfurt Years- http://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm

[7] From the student movement to the Greens- http://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/23.html

[8] On the Concept of History-https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

[9] The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books-marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8113_the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left-review-by-javier-sethness/

“I’m literally a communist, you idiot.”

Ash Sarkar

If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought based on his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought.

Leon Trotsky

“Every sociological definition is, at the bottom, a historical prognosis.”

Leon Trotsky

A recurring theme written about by both left and right-wing contemporary writers, politicians and historians is that the working class has all but disappeared and is no longer the revolutionary force it once was.

Another theme so beloved by the right-wing has been the concept of “the end of history.” In January 1992, Francis Fukuyama, at the time a neo-conservative academic and a former US State Department official, published The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama wrote:

“All countries un­dergoing economic modernisation must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally based on a central­ized state, urbanise, replace traditional forms of social organiza­tion like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increas­ingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolu­tion in the direction of capitalism.“[1]

In a counter article, the Classical Marxist David North wrote, “It is painful to read the gloating stupidities that were churned out by Western academics in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union. Seemingly every journal devoted to politics, current affairs or culture felt obliged to publish a special issue devoted to the supposed rout of socialism. The word “End” or “Death”, or “Fall” or a synonym had to be included somewhere in the title.”

In Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar attempts, admittedly somewhat badly, to refute both premises mentioned above. Although Sarkar has described herself as  “Literally a Communist”,[2] Like some other pseudo-lefts before her, she uses Marxist phraseology but in reality has no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class, saying that they have succumbed to the right-wing media offensive and have abandoned the class war for the “culture war”, her term, not mine. Sarkar’s other thesis, which complements the first, is that fears of minority rule of one kind serve to legitimate minority rule of another sort. This thesis is hardly new or Marxist.

Sarkar cultivates the image of a “sassy social commentator”. She has a large online presence, boasting over half a million followers across her social media platforms, not bad for a so-called Communist. She is well paid for her services. Bloomsbury published Minority Rule, with a “major deal”, which means they paid her a hefty advance. She is a senior editor at Novara Media,[3] . Teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and writes for The Guardian and The Independent.

I am at a loss to find another avowed Communist who has been allotted so much space by so many bourgeois media outlets. She has been compared to the political scoundrel Tariq Ali. Like Ali, she has become a useful Pseudo left safety valve in times of trouble. Perhaps one should compare her treatment to that dished out against the orthodox Marxists from the World Socialist Website that have recently come under sustained attack from Google and other bourgeois media.[4]  

In a book that is over three hundred pages, it is difficult, if not impossible deal with every pearl of wisdom emanating from the pen of Sarkar, but a few are worth discussing. On pages 24 and 25, she describes a conference in Liverpool at which Roger Hallam was one of the main speakers. Hallam is the leader of XR, which single-handedly failed with its perspective to reverse the degradation of the planet. XR proposes the same model of capitalism with a green environmental tinge, backed up with protests, promoted by successive Green and similar parties worldwide. Sarkar then somewhat incredulously compares Hallam with Leon Trotsky, both she believes are wounded revolutionaries.

In the book, she offers limited criticism of so-called “Left-liberals” who have promoted identity politics. Sarkar’s offer up a somewhat confused understanding of the term herself. It is clear from the book that Sarkar is not completely hostile to “identity politics” or the growing number of pseudo-left organisations that promote it as a means of dividing the working class. She writes, “Identity has become the dominant preoccupation for both the left and the right”.

I somehow doubt that Sarkar has read any thing from the World Socialist Website but in his foreword to the book The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Psuedo lefts editorial Board Chairman David North provided a concise “working definition” of the pseudo-left and it preoccupation of identity politics  as follows: 1) It is “anti-Marxist, rejects historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism”; (2), It is “anti-socialist, opposes the class struggle, and denies the central role of the working class and the necessity of socialist revolution in the progressive transformation of society”; (3) It “promotes ‘identity politics,’ fixating on issues related to nationality, ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality in order to acquire greater influence in corporations, the colleges and universities, higher-paying professions, trade unions and in government and state institutions, to effect a more favourable distributions of wealth among the richest ten percent of the population”; and, (4) “in the imperialist centres of North America, Western Europe and Australasia, the pseudo-left is generally pro-imperialist, and utilizes the slogans of ‘human rights’ to legitimize, and even directly support, neo-colonialist military operations.”[5]

According to her Wikipedia page, Sarkar has many political influences. Her main one appears to be the radical, pseudo-left artist and writer Franco “Bifo” Berardi. According to Sybil Fuchs, “Berardi is a philosopher, writer, media activist and long-standing critic of capitalism. He was expelled from the Italian Communist Party in the 1960s because of alleged ‘factionalism.” He is considered to be the leader of Italy’s anarchist movement. In the 1980s, he worked with Félix Guattari in developing an alternative psychoanalysis, and in the ’90s, he promoted so-called cyberpunk. His most recent book, Futurability (2017), was published by Verso Press. In 2009, he wrote a counter-manifesto to the famous Futurist Manifesto authored by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti in 1909.”[6]

Despite her yelling at the top of her voice that she is a Communist, it was her support for Jeremy Corbyn that showed her real political colouration. Like all pseudo-lefts, she threw her lot in with Corbyn’s election campaign. She writes in her book, “In hindsight, I was self-deluding and hubristic; I got swept up in the fantasy of what a socialist government could be like. There were far more people in the country who weren’t like me than those who were.”[7]

As the real Marxist Chris Marsden wrote “Corbyn was advanced by Britain’s pseudo-left groups such as the Socialist Workers Party and sections of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy as proof that the rightward lurch of the Labour Party, beginning in the 1970s, encompassing Neil Kinnock’s betrayal of the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and culminating in the New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown could be reversed. Corbyn promised an end to austerity, Thatcherite free-market nostrums and war crimes such as Iraq in 2003.

The enthusiasm generated saw Labour claw back in the 2017 election some of the 5 million votes lost under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010. But this recovery has collapsed, amid growing disenchantment among those who backed Corbyn and abstention and a shift to other parties by workers who see no reason whatsoever to remain loyal to Labour.”[8]

While everyone is allowed to be wrong once, and Sarkar did renounce her membership, it only goes to show that despite all her bravado and so-called “Communism”, she could not see past her nose and see what a stinking political corpse the Labour Party was and is.

Although Sarkar correctly states that “the politics we’ve got are a reflection of the balance of class forces within society”, she fundamentally underplays one of those “class Forces”, Fascism. Whether in the UK in the form of Farage or the fascist in the White House in the guise of Donald Trump whom she calls a Popular Nationalist. Even after 300 pages of so-called political analysis, she says next to nothing in the book about the dangers of fascism.

In his introduction to the book The Rise of Trump and the Crisis of American Democracy, Joseph Kishore makes the following point that the return of Donald Trump to power represents “the violent realignment of the American political superstructure to correspond with the real social relations that exist in the United States. He continues, “Trump’s rise and return to power is not an aberration but the product of deep-rooted crises in American and world capitalism. His administration is carrying out a historic restructuring of the state, tearing apart the remaining democratic constraints on oligarchic rule, and preparing for global war.”

Sarkar is not a Marxist but a glorified pseudo-left. She is opposed to the development of an independent socialist movement of the working class. To build this movement, an unrelenting struggle against all forms of pseudo-left and opportunist politics is needed.

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[1] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, January 1992)

[2] During a heated TV debate about Trump and Obama on ITV, she said: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot.”

[3] novaramedia.com/

[4] An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site!- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html

[5] www.wsws.org/en/special/pages/pseudoleft.html

[6] Documenta 14 exhibition in Kassel, Germany: The censorship and defaming of art-   www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/06/docu-s06.html

[7] Minority Rule Adventures in the Culture War – Ash Sarkar

[8] UK general election result confirms protracted death of the Labour Party-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/19/poll-d19.html