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

It is hard to imagine why a writer who has not published a single work on the workers’ movement and had no previous connection to a revolutionary organisation would accept the complex task of writing a biography of Leon Trotsky.

One clue as to why Josh Ireland would accept the daunting challenge can be found on his acknowledgement page. Apart from Isaac Deutcher, Ireland thanked several right-wing historians and writers, including Stephen Kotkin. Recently, the politically loathsome Kotkin wrote:

“Why should anyone care about Leon Trotsky in this day and age? A Marxist revolutionary who opposed but ultimately joined forces with Vladimir Lenin, he fought his entire life against markets and private property, parliaments and the rule of law, defending the Soviet state even as he denounced its leader, Joseph Stalin. That utopia imploded in ignominy decades ago.[1]

Kotkin’s love of Stalin notwithstanding, one reason for these right-wingers’ ire at Trotsky’s popularity lies in a recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov. A significant number, 62 per cent of Americans aged 18–29, say they hold a “favourable view” of socialism, and 34 per cent say the same of communism.

These statistics and others caused the rapid right-wing Cato Institute and one of its attack dogs, Michael Chapman, to vomit up this unhinged comment: “This is shocking given that communism is responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide and is rooted in socialism, the same philosophy that spawned both Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism. To favour socialism is to flirt with tyranny. Therefore, libertarians must educate more Americans to recognise the socialist actions of big government and fight against them. As Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, “the rise of fascism and Marxism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.” He also noted that both Mussolini and Hitler started as socialists.”[2]

Ireland’s ideological friend, Kotkin, who wrote a multi-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, has received widespread attention in both bourgeois and academic circles. From a Marxist standpoint, Kotkin’s work and Ireland’s work, for that matter, must be judged not as neutral scholarship but as political interventions. Kotkin’s method and conclusions, like Ireland’s, distort class relations, which serve the ruling-class and petit-bourgeois ideological needs.

Ireland adopts a historiographical posture that substitutes personality-centred narration and postmodern relativism for a class analysis of social forces. This method raises the fundamental question: which social classes and material relations produced Stalinism and made the bureaucratic caste politically dominant? By treating Stalin as the decisive, almost autonomous actor—rather than a product and amplifier of objective social transformations and bureaucratic interests Ireland reproduces a bourgeois individualised account of history that obscures the social foundations of political power. His book contains factual distortions and a very selective use of sources.

Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky joins a very crowded market of books that adopt a journalistic tone or are popular history treatments, such as Allan Todd’s Trotsky: The Passionate Revolutionary.[3] Ireland’s book from the very start treats  Leon Trotsky’s murder in Mexico in 1940 in the manner of an individual crime story rather than a political episode which was the product of social forces, state power, in the form of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

One of Ireland’s more monstrous claims is that Stalinism was historically inevitable and that Trotsky would have acted in the same way had he defeated Stalin. Ireland’s is a teleological and ahistorical argument that collapses political struggle into fatalism. The rise of the bureaucracy was conditioned by objective isolation and by social forces inside the USSR; it was not the only possible outcome. I would offer a Marxist counterfactual viewpoint, based on the program and documented alternatives of the Left Opposition, which reveals genuine strategic alternatives that were politically feasible yet suppressed by the bureaucracy.[4]

One of the hallmarks of a serious historian is examining all the most important documents or books relevant to the subject matter. This extensive search entails copious reading and attending to the most significant archival research. However, on the latter, it is perhaps extraordinary, though not entirely fatal, that Ireland only visited two archives.

Ireland’s book examines a limited amount of standard facts, such as the GPU (Stalin’s secret police), conducting a prolonged campaign of infiltration, frame-ups and political preparation that culminated in the May 24, 1940, raid led by David Alfaro Siqueiros and the successful August 20–21 assassination by Ramón Mercader.

These stand-out facts are available almost anywhere on the internet. What troubles me greatly is that Ireland and a host of other historians writing about the assassination of Leon Trotsky refuse, point-blank, to either look at or mention the copious amounts of detailed information, including a major ongoing investigation called Security and the Fourth International, available on the World Socialist Website. Writers from the International Committee of the Fourth International and the WSWS have reviewed the facts of the case. Much of the work is groundbreaking and contains information about the assassination that no one else has uncovered. (See, for example, the ICFI’s investigation and David North’s “Trotsky’s Last Year”.[5] The ICFI/WSWS lectures and reports on the GPU plot and its methods, and Eric London’s Agents, The FBI and GPU Infiltration of the Trotskyist Movement. Ireland is either a lazy historian or is ideologically driven to ignore sources from a left-wing perspective that would counter his right-wing narrative.

As the great historian E.H Carr would always say, study the historian before you study the history. In Ireland’s case, this is put on a plate when he made the following comments: “Some writers are frauds, a good number are competent, a select few are geniuses, but all of them are procrastinators. I was a procrastinator long before I was a writer; I think it was my talent for procrastination that made me believe I might have what it took to become one. And now that I am, theoretically, paid to put words on a page, procrastination still occupies the bigger part of my day. My most productive form of procrastination is looking at old photos, specifically of the men and women I’m writing about, even more specifically, the clothes that they wear. Some of this is similar to the pleasure one gets from scrolling through a chic person’s Instagram account or a well-styled lookbook: it’s nice to see interesting people wearing interesting clothes! But I also see it as a valuable avenue of historical and psychological enquiry.

The aesthetic choices people make are as revealing of their personality and predilections as other sources, such as diaries or letters. When we dress, we make a series of choices. Even when we think we’re not making a choice – perhaps because we dress conventionally, according to the fashions or conventions of our time or place; or because we tell ourselves that we don’t care about what we wear – we are showing people something about how we view the world and how we want to engage with it.[6] This quote tells a lot about how Ireland sees the world.

The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was one of the most important political events of the 20^th century and still has a contemporary resonance. Ireland presents this struggle as a personal one. However, the conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin was not merely a personal rivalry. It was a political-ideological struggle rooted in concrete class interests and the social transformations set in motion by the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Read dialectically, the confrontation expressed opposing responses to the objective problems of building proletarian power amid economic backwardness, bureaucratic growth and international capitalist restoration.

Josh Ireland’s book, like other contributions from the milieu of post‑Soviet revisionism, must be assessed not as isolated quarrels over biography but as political products of a social and ideological conjuncture. From a Marxist, materialist standpoint, the central question is: what class interests and social forces underlie attempts to belittle Trotsky and erase the political alternatives he represented?

Definite social forces produce the post‑Soviet revisionism and the diminishment of Trotsky’s role. Ireland’s work serves bourgeois material interests and distorts the concrete historical record.

Leon Trotsky is not merely a biographical subject; his work and most importantly, the Theory of Permanent Revolution, his critique of bureaucratic degeneration, and the founding program of the Fourth International, represent an alternative political program to both capitalist restoration and Stalinist bureaucracy. Attempts to reduce Trotsky to a marginal, unreliable, or merely rhetorical figure are not neutral scholarly disputes. They are political operations that, intentionally or not, assist bourgeois ideological currents by obscuring revolutionary perspectives and legitimating the outcomes of Stalinism and post‑Soviet capitalism.

Josh Ireland’s writings participate in the post‑Soviet critique and reproduce its tendencies—then they must be read as part of that broader ideological current. Whether the aim is to reduce Trotsky to a marginal figure, to treat his writings as unreliable, or to portray Stalinist outcomes as inevitable, these propositions are political positions rooted in the shifting balance of class forces since 1991: the restoration of capitalist power in the former USSR, the triumph of market ideology, and the need among sections of the intelligentsia to reconcile with the new order.

The revival of post‑Soviet falsification is not an abstract scholarly quarrel; it corresponds to real political danger today—weakening the capacity of workers to recognise the need for independent organisation and a revolutionary program.

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[1] The moral squalor stemming from communist conviction-www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/20/leon-trotsky-soviet-communism/

[2] Young Americans Like Socialism Too Much—That’s a Problem Libertarians Must Fix-https://www.cato.org/blog/young-americans-socialism-too-much-thats-problem-libertarians-must-fix

[3] See-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2026/02/trotsky-passionate-revolutionary-by.html

[4] Was There An Alternative -Vadim Rogovin-Mehring Books 2021

[5] Trotsky’s Last Year-1-6 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/20/anni-a20.html

[6] On Trotsky & Procrastination-www.williamcrabtree.co.uk/blogs/news

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

Rosa Luxemburg

Naomi Baker’s new book is to be commended as she has rescued a significant number of radical Women of the seventeenth century from what E.P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity”.[1] History and Historians in general have not been kind to women who were radicalised during the English Revolution. There is a dearth of material on women’s struggle. No major biography exists of two of the most important Leveller women, Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.

Baker is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. Her new book is well written and is a meticulous examination of women who not only had to battle against their male counterparts but also had to struggle against the violent attacks of the English aristocracy and sections of the bourgeoisie who refused to accept their democratic right to protest against social inequality and tyranny.

Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century is set within the context of the long political crisis of the 17th century, which saw commercial expansion, the rise of towns and manufacturers, a crisis of monarchy and landed privilege, and produced an explosive alignment of forces. As Frederick Engels shows,

“When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, too, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.”[2]

As Engel correctly states, the seventeenth century was a period of social and economic upheaval in which religious dissent fused with emerging political and social currents. The decomposition of feudalism led to the emergence of new classes and struggles. The rapid growth of sects like the Quakers and Ranters, which fueled peasant and urban uprisings, was bound up with transformations in production and class alignments.

Women such as Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Fell,  Lady Anne Conway, Katherine Chidley, and the many unnamed women who participated in sects (Quakers, Ranters, Levellers’ sympathisers, and radical Baptists) played vital roles in contesting clerical and state authority, defending popular religious autonomy, and advancing early arguments for conscience, equality and popular rights. Their struggles are best understood as part of the bourgeois revolutions and the awakening of radical thought, which began with the Reformation and culminated in the 1640 English bourgeois revolution.

Religious sects took full advantage of the world turned upside down, undertaking radical pamphleteering and mass mobilisation. This created political spaces where women, both poor and rich, could express themselves as radicals, preachers, writers, and organisers. Baker believes there was no single “school”; women appeared across all economic, political, and social tendencies, but upon reading the book, it seems a significant number were protesting against social inequality. As Christopher Hill observed, the English Revolution helped many women both to establish their own independence and to visualise a total escape for the poorer classes. It was the poorer classes that suffered the greatest degradation regularly through jail, torture, war and disease.

Margaret Fell was a Quaker who combined religious dissent with organisational work within meetings and through pamphlets, arguing for spiritual equality in ways that had political consequences. The Levellers included women like Katherine Chidley, who wrote, “Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood”?[3]

Leveller women like Chidley supported petitions, military grievances, and political club activity; they pressed for legal changes and denounced arbitrary power. Ranters and some Diggers, though numerically smaller, pushed the limits of acceptable discourse, challenging sexual, familial, and proprietary norms. Large numbers of women-led relief networks, parochial committees and protests against price rises and conscription-like abuses, linking economic suffering to political demands.

These activities were expressions of class interests formed by material necessity: survival, defence of household livelihoods, resistance to arbitrary levies and enclosures. For many women, the fight for social and political equality would be their first involvement in politics. It can be said without contradiction that women like Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne laid the basis for future struggles of working-class women, such as the suffragettes.

The phenomenon of radical religious women in the seventeenth century — sectarians, prophetic preachers, petitioners and organisers among Quakers, Ranters, Baptists and other sects should be grasped scientifically by placing it in the framework of historical materialism. These women did not act in a vacuum: their ideas, forms of organisation and modes of struggle were rooted in shifting modes of production, class relations and state power.

Marxism begins from the premise that the economic base shapes the ideological superstructure. Religious movements did not float free of material life; they arose from and reflect concrete social relations. As Karl Marx maintained, there is a dialectical relationship between the economic base and the ideological superstructure writing in the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he makes the following point  “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”[4]

Acts carried out by female radicals should be analysed dialectically: the religious idiom contained egalitarian content (an attack on hierarchical priesthood, the struggle for spiritual equality developed into political militancy, but it also carried conservative potential that confined it to moral appeals without linking it to collective economic struggle.

Naomi Baker’s” interest in seventeenth-century radical religious women is commendable, but the struggle of these women should be treated as a social phenomenon rooted in material conditions. Individual biographies and religious language matter, but only within a historical‑materialist account that connects ideas to class relations, production, and the state.

Radical women who expressed religious language or organised through faith-based networks must be analysed in relation to the continuity of such traditions. Are the struggles of these women grounded just in the defence of household subsistence, wages, or communal relief, or do they articulate wider class demands? Seventeenth-century women were moved from religious protest to political action; their modern counterparts must be evaluated by whether their struggles advance class action or merely moral protest.

There is a Contemporary relevance to this book. For a Marxist, the emancipation of women is inseparable from the socialist revolution. Historically, religious radicalism only played a progressive role when it politicised oppressed layers and helped forge independent class organisations. But it becomes reactionary when it replaced class struggle with appeals to conscience, charity, or bourgeois courts. Thus, comparing Naomi Baker’s seventeenth-century radical women with today’s radicals is useful only to the extent that it helps activists draw lessons for the upcoming socialist revolution.

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[1]  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12.

[2] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific- Friedrich Engels, 1880

[3] Women’s Petition (1649)-From J. O’Faolain and L Martines, Not in God’s Image (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 266-267.

[4] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children is a collection of essays that brutally exposes what it was like to live in the United States as a Black worker in the early 20^th century.

Born in 1908, Richard Wright is by far one of the most important working-class writers of the 20th century. His major works, Black Boy, Native Son, and his essays are not merely literary achievements; they are social documents that analyse how material conditions, class relations, and racial domination shape consciousness and behaviour. Wright’s development from a Southern sharecropper’s son to a writer who engaged with Communist and socialist circles in the 1930s exemplifies the dialectical relation between objective social conditions and subjective formation: economic precarity, social exclusion and how the violence of Jim Crow produced a political sensibility that sought collective, systemic remedies rather than individualised responses.

Wright’s method is fundamentally Marxist in orientation, even if he did not always fully self-identify as an orthodox Marxist. This is evident in his attitude toward Leon Trotsky. Wright was strongly attracted to Marxist analysis and to anti‑Stalinist critiques. Many intellectuals of Wright’s generation viewed Trotsky, who combined a searching analysis of the Soviet degeneration with a firm commitment to working‑class internationalism, as a compelling theoretical and moral reference. Trotsky’s dialectical materialist method and his insistence that the proletariat must be politically independent of bourgeois and bureaucratic forces resonated with anti‑racist writers who refused to subordinate the struggle of Black people to existing parties and state apparatuses.

Wright was not a Trotskyist in the doctrinal sense of an allegiance to the Fourth International; rather, his attraction to Trotskyist ideas was of the intellectual and moral kind: Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, his emphasis on world revolution, and his analysis of how class relations shape consciousness offered resources for Wright’s own attempts to understand the racial question within world capitalism.

His characters in Uncle Tom’s Children show that racism is not a metaphysical or cultural “essence” but a social relation rooted in property, labour markets and the political organisation of capitalist society. Bigger Thomas in Native Son is comprehensible not as an expression of immutable racial pathology, but as the product of exclusion, proletarianization, and the social powerlessness imposed by capitalist and racial rule. Wright adopts a materialist conception of history to understand the social, economic, and political problems facing both black and white populations. The black working class holds that ideas and racial ideologies arise from and reflect class structures and economic imperatives, not the other way around.

Like many intellectuals and workers, Wright’s formative years and his political maturation occurred amid the Great Depression, the growth of industrial labour militancy, the rise of the Communist movement in the United States, and the international polarisations of the 1930s and 1940s. These were years in which the boundaries between cultural expression and political struggle blurred: literature became a form of social investigation and a weapon for political education.

Wright’s involvement with left-wing circles, his brushes with Communist Party orthodoxy, and his eventual break illustrate the complex interplay among revolutionary aspiration, the bureaucratic limitations of existing organisations, and the need for a revolutionary strategy rooted in the working class. His later travels and expatriation in Paris also reflect the international character of his struggle.

Richard Wright’s literature—from Black Boy to Native Son—remains an essential starting point for any serious discussion of race, class and the social psychology of oppression in the United States. Wright wrote as a proletarian intellectual: his fiction and essays insist that the oppression of Black people is rooted not in a metaphysical “racial DNA” but in specific social relations—segregated labour markets, violent property relations and the structural violence of capitalism.

Wright’s work traces how poverty, wage labour, discrimination and the threat of racial violence shape individual psychology and mass politics. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas’s crimes are not metaphysical expressions of an immutable racial pathology; they are the social consequences of exclusion, desperate material conditions and systemic dehumanisation. Wright’s political development—his engagement with communist and socialist circles in the 1930s—further grounded his view that the fight against racism must be situated within the struggle against capitalism and private property.

It is a testament to his political foresight and integrity that his books are still widely read today and remain relevant. Wright’s insistence that liberation requires systemic change remains crucial as workers today confront mass poverty, racist policing, mass incarceration and an economy reorganised around austerity and profit. The ruling class weaponises racism to prevent working-class unity; Wright’s work shows the political cost of accepting explanations that dissociate race from class and capitalism.

Wright’s political insights have even greater resonance in today’s debates, such as the controversy surrounding the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which presented a racialist view of historical developments. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) critiqued the 1619 Project. Extensive documentation of this struggle can be found on the World Socialist Website.[1]

The SEP argued that the 1619 Project substituted racialist narratives for class analysis and treated racism as an immutable feature of American “DNA” rather than a historically specific product of capitalist development. Wright was not mentioned in the 1619 Project. For good reason, his materialist orientation not only cuts across the 1619 Project’s racialist interpretation of history, but also offers an antidote: it compels us to analyse how slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, migration, and proletarianization transformed social relations and created class potentialities for solidarity, unionism, and revolutionary politics.

To summarise from the standpoint of contemporary political life, Wright’s life and work underscore the necessity of connecting literary and intellectual inquiry to an independent working-class political struggle. Richard Wright remains a living challenge to the politics of identity that divorces race from class. His materialist, proletarian humanism points the way: the liberation of Black people is bound to the emancipation of the working class as a whole. Only through a united, politically independent working‑class struggle can the social relations that produce racism be abolished. Richard Wright’s legacy is both cultural and political: he challenges fatalism, rejects racial essentialism, and insists that emancipation requires transforming the social relations of production. His work remains a vital resource as a class-based alternative to capitalism.

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[1] The New York Timesâ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History

David North; Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books

 “ 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.