A walking guide recovers two centuries of struggle in the capital, yet it fails to provide readers with the political lessons that these struggles were intended to convey.

Ninety years on from the Battle of Cable Street, the debate about London’s radical past is far from academic. In a city currently marked by such extreme social inequality, by the crisis of housing affordability, by the decline of public services and by the re-emergence of a kind of nationalism and anti-migrant politics, the history of those who had fought against poverty, exploitation, political repression and fascism is very much with us.

This is what makes the third edition of David Rosenberg’s Rebel Footprints a particularly valuable contribution. It is neither a conventional history of London nor merely a guidebook. Rather, it offers a political geography of the city, built from the author’s own walks, connecting streets and buildings to the movements that occurred there. Pluto Press describes the revised edition as guiding the reader from well-known to lesser-known sites associated with struggles from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The third edition substantially revises the book, now comprising eleven main chapters. The Russian Revolution and the East End, Hackney, and radical Soho all receive new or reorganised treatment. The volume concludes with an epilogue on the Brick Lane struggles of the 1970s, and Michael Rosen provides the foreword.

The enterprise is immense. Rosenberg brings workers, immigrants, women, political exiles, anti-fascists, and socialist organisers back into the picture in a way they have largely been absent. The significance of the history he recovers makes the shortcomings of his political approach all the more glaring. Rebel Footprints is absolutely full of the notion that history is made through struggle. It simply doesn’t come to terms with the question of why movements of such immense courage and such broad popular support ended up with such limited political outcomes, why they were defeated or why they were absorbed into institutions which were themselves committed to the defence of the social order against which those movements had been directed. The central issue is therefore a question of political perspective. It is a history of rebellion, but not a history of the working class’s struggle for revolutionary leadership.

A rebellious city

The underlying concept of Rebel Footprints is absolutely effective. The streets we normally see as routes between railway stations, offices, shops, and houses are reconfigured as physical evidence of political struggle. London stops being the endless accumulation of palaces, monuments and institutions of the state as presented to us by the tourist industry. It becomes a landscape of contestation.

The 2026 edition begins with “Trailblazers for Democracy in Fleet Street and Clerkenwell”, followed by “Sparks of Rebellion in Bow and Whitechapel”. It then explores “The Russian Revolution and London’s East End”, “No Gods, No Masters: Radical Bloomsbury”, “Hackney’s Buried Histories” and the struggle for housing in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. Subsequent chapters move south and west through Battersea and Soho, then head east again to Poplar, Bermondsey, and, finally, Cable Street and Long Lane. The historical itinerary continues beyond the main chapters with the epilogue, “Battleground Brick Lane 1970s”.

In my view, this is one of Rosenberg’s real masterpieces. The geographical structure prevents radical history from being boiled down to the life stories of a few famous people. Political movements get a locality. They had meeting houses, workshops, factories, tenements and streets. Rosenberg has been running London social and political history walks since 2008. When talking about the genesis of the project, he has been very clear about the influence of Bill Fishman, the historian who believed you could understand history in a very real way, not just through the lecture hall but by walking through the very places where it happened. That is a very democratic approach. It’s a way of confronting the monumental history of the city that the ruling class has always presented as its own.

History against official London

This is where Rebel Footprints is at its very best. London’s history is increasingly being presented through the lens of heritage, tourism and property. The working people who actually built the city are only there in passing. Rosenberg flips the script completely. The centre of historical interest moves from Westminster, the monarchy and the City to the political activity of the very people who are normally invisible. The book is designed to get you to look at the apparently mundane and ask a very different set of questions: who lived here, who worked here, who organised here and what struggles took place here?

That approach has real power in a city which is constantly being reshaped by property speculation. Working-class areas get redeveloped and repackaged, and their social history is often turned into marketable ‘heritage’. Rosenberg’s approach is the other way around. The city itself becomes the archive. The history is also inherently international. London was not just the British capital. All over the world, industrialisation, empire and political repression have brought workers, refugees and political exiles into the city. Radical London was never a purely English phenomenon.

History is of course particularly pertinent when migrants are once again being presented as the cause of social problems they didn’t create. The history of workers breaking down national, ethnic, and religious barriers points overwhelmingly to a class explanation of inequality. The very notion of internationalism in the labour movement is, however, problematic, and Rebel Footprints doesn’t address it adequately. London was both the epicentre of working-class resistance and the capital of the world’s largest empire. The relationship between those two realities is fundamental to understanding British labour history.

The Russian Revolution comes to the East End

One of the most significant additions in the 2026 edition is a whole chapter on ‘The Russian Revolution and London’s East End’. That massively broadens the political canvas. The Russian Revolution can’t just be tacked on as part of the general tradition of London radicalism. October 1917 was a moment of total rupture. For the first time, the working class, under Marxist leadership, took state power and began reconstructing society on a socialist basis. That in itself was a moment of international political significance, and Britain was no different.

The importance of the Russian Revolution to the British working class cannot be confined to inspiration, solidarity, and radical culture. It sparked a major debate about revolutionary organisation, reformism, and the working class’s political independence. That debate had a very real and tangible effect on the British labour movement. This is where the distinction between radical history and Marxist history becomes so important. Radicalism is such a broad term that it can cover everything from democrats to anarchists, pacifists, syndicalists, feminists, trade unionists, Labour reformists, communists, and revolutionary Marxists. What these different tendencies had in common was that they all provided diametrically opposed answers to the fundamental questions of state, capitalism, imperialism and political leadership. To absorb them into a single category of ‘radicalism’ and celebrate them as such risks erasing the very disagreements that ultimately shaped history.

The Labour Party as the destination of struggle

This is clearest where the histories of local revolt intersect with the growth of Labourism. You can see it in many of the people you met in Rosenberg’s London who went from militant working-class politics to parliamentary Labourism. It wasn’t just a series of individual biographies. It was a fundamental process in shaping the British labour movement.

The key historical question, of course, is why. The reformist interpretation is that the Labour Party, the recognition of trade unions, municipal reform, and ultimately the post-war welfare state were simply the institutionalisation of the popular struggles of the 19th century. In that view, the rebels of the 19th century are the forerunners of 20th century social democracy.

A Marxist account has to put the issue in a different light. Reform and revolution were alternative approaches to the problem, stemming from different conceptions of the capitalist state. The point is that reform in itself doesn’t alter the capitalist relations of property or the nature of state power. The 20th century has shown time and again that reforms won under pressure from the working class can be taken away when the balance of class forces has shifted. British working-class radicalism therefore cannot be thought of as having reached its logical conclusion in the Labour Party. Labourism itself has to be a subject of historical analysis.

Poplar and the limits of municipal socialism

The Poplar struggle is the textbook example. The willingness of the councillors to go to jail rather than impose such onerous burdens on the poor working people was absolutely a landmark moment in London labour history. It was a demonstration of what could happen when a body of elected representatives was under the pressure of a mobilised working class. Poplar also, of course, highlights the limits of municipal politics. Municipal socialism can redistribute resources within the boundaries of the national state. It cannot abolish the capitalist social relations that are the very source of inequality.

This is particularly pertinent to George Lansbury. You can’t understand his political evolution in terms of sheer personal courage or moral commitment alone. You have to see it as part of the evolution of Labourism. Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going? (1925) is still absolutely essential precisely because it looked at the contradictions of British reformism at a time of intensifying class struggle. Trotsky argued that the apparent gradualism and peacefulness of British politics masked deep-seated class antagonisms. That argument is not confined to Lansbury. Workers could be extremely militant within organisations which were formally and in practice nationally reformist. That contradiction is the thread which runs through much of the history Rosenberg reconstructs.

Battersea and the politics of accommodation

The Battersea section is another example of the book’s strength in that it doesn’t present a one-dimensional political picture. It’s very much a geographical chapter in which south London is not some marginal area to the more ‘familiar’ revolutionary history of the East End. Of course, you have the same thing with individuals who start out in working-class and socialist movements and then go on to become quite accommodative of the existing order. Those shifts too can’t be explained by biography alone. They resulted from very specific historical and material conditions. The strength of British capitalism, the huge amount of capital accumulated through empire, the power of the parliamentary system and the development of a privileged trade union bureaucracy all exerted a pressure on the labour movement.

That’s why London’s history is inextricably bound up with Britain’s position as an imperial power. The same city which was home to such profound levels of poverty was the administrative and financial heart of the empire. The fact that such extreme poverty coexisted with the metropolis’s immense wealth was a direct consequence of the international structure of British capitalism. You simply can’t make sense of the particular vigour of British reformism without placing imperialism at the very centre of the analysis rather than at the margins.

Cable Street: heroism and political mythology

The chapter on Cable Street remains inevitably one of the most powerful parts of this historical landscape. The Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 belongs to the collective memory of London’s working class because Jewish, Irish and other workers mobilised against Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement and attempts to march through the East End.

There is every reason to defend this memory. But Cable Street must also be rescued from mythology. The question is not whether Communist Party members and supporters fought courageously. Many unquestionably did. The historical problem is the politics of Stalinism and the Popular Front. By 1936 the Communist International had abandoned the revolutionary internationalism associated with the October Revolution. The Popular Front subordinated the independent political movement of workers to alliances with supposedly democratic sections of the bourgeoisie.

This was not an abstract dispute occurring somewhere outside the history Rosenberg describes. At precisely the time British workers confronted fascists in London, the Spanish Revolution posed questions of state power, revolution, and counter-revolution with immense urgency. Any account that commemorates anti-fascist militancy while treating the Popular Front primarily as a strategy of broad democratic unity misses the fundamental political issue. Courage cannot substitute for programme. Indeed, that is one of the central lessons running through twentieth-century history: workers repeatedly demonstrated immense courage while being led by organisations whose political strategy subordinated them to forces protecting capitalist property and state power.

What is missing: Trotskyism

The absence of sustained engagement with the Trotskyist movement consequently becomes more conspicuous as the historical narrative approaches the 1930s. Trotskyism was not simply another radical current competing beside anarchism, Labourism, feminism or Stalinism. The Left Opposition, and later the Fourth International, arose from the struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and Stalinism’s abandonment of socialist internationalism. This had direct implications for every major political question in the latter part of Rosenberg’s book: fascism, the German catastrophe of 1933, the Popular Front, the Spanish Revolution, imperialism, and the approach of another world war.

One need not convert a London walking guide into a history of the Fourth International. But once a book seeks not simply to identify places but to explain radical political traditions, suppressing or marginalising conflicts over revolutionary programme becomes consequential. Without those conflicts, Stalinism risks appearing as merely another component of the broader radical tradition. It was far more historically significant than that.

Brick Lane and the extension beyond 1939

The addition of“Battleground Brick Lane 1970s” is therefore particularly interesting. It breaks the earlier tendency for Rosenberg’s narrative to terminate around the Second World War and carries the geography of struggle into London’s later history. That is a valuable development because migration changed but did not end the political character of the East End. The location that had earlier witnessed the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers became associated with later struggles involving newer migrant communities.

Placing those experiences within the same geographical landscape carries considerable historical power. The danger, however, remains that the concept of radical continuity replaces political differentiation. Successive populations certainly confronted discrimination and racist mobilisation. But the organisations, programmes and international political conditions within which they fought changed profoundly. Continuity of struggle should not be confused with continuity of politics.

Rosenberg and Corbynism

The project’s political standpoint becomes particularly apparent in Rosenberg’s own retrospective account of the book’s history. Writing about the third edition in November 2026, Rosenberg recalled that Jeremy Corbyn was one of the speakers at the launch of the original edition in 2015. He describes Corbyn’s subsequent entry into the Labour leadership contest as heralding “one of the most exciting and hopeful periods in Labour’s post-war history” and notes that enthusiasm for earlier radicals increased when Corbyn became Labour leader, with what Rosenberg calls a “solid mandate for radical change”.

This is politically revealing. Corbynism represented an attempt to channel the widespread opposition created by years of austerity back through the Labour Party. Its essential proposition was that Labour could be reclaimed and transformed through mass membership and pressure from below. The fate of this project cannot be treated as external to the political lessons of Rebel Footprints. If history is invoked to demonstrate what mobilisation can accomplish, it is equally necessary to examine what happens when mobilisation remains politically imprisoned within organisations defending the existing state. The critical historical issue is therefore not simply that movements need courage, organisation or pressure from below. British labour history has all three. The issue is political independence.

History from below and the problem of leadership

The book shares many strengths with the tradition usually described as history from below. It turns attention away from monarchs, prime ministers and generals and towards people whose experiences were routinely excluded from official history. That intellectual achievement should not be diminished. But there is a danger in transforming history from below into history only from below.

The working class does not make history under circumstances of its own choosing. Spontaneous struggle does not automatically provide the political programme needed to overcome capitalism. Workers encounter existing parties, trade unions, bureaucracies and ideologies. Different tendencies struggle consciously for leadership. Consequently, leadership is itself a historical question. Why did revolutionary opportunities end in defeat? Why did reformist organisations acquire authority? Why did Communist parties that originated under the impact of October become defenders of Stalinism? Why did organisations created by workers come to police workers’ struggles? These questions cannot be answered simply by reconstructing mobilisation, however sympathetically or vividly. The working class requires historical memory, but memory without political analysis can become commemoration.

The continuing value of Rebel Footprints

None of this diminishes the usefulness of Rosenberg’s achievement. The fact that the third edition exists at all indicates the continuing appetite for histories different from those supplied by official heritage culture. A contemporary favourable assessment describes the walks as a form of public “history from below” that makes the histories of ordinary people accessible through the city itself. Readers should use the book exactly in that spirit.

Walk Fleet Street and Clerkenwell. Walk Bow and Whitechapel. Walk Bloomsbury, Hackney, Battersea, Soho, Poplar, Bermondsey, Cable Street and Brick Lane. Look behind the expensive apartments, redeveloped warehouses and commercial façades. Recover the city inhabited by generations who refused to accept the conditions imposed upon them. But then ask the questions that the landscape itself cannot answer. Why were their victories limited? Why were reforms reversed? Why did organisations built through working-class sacrifice accommodate themselves to capitalism? Why did socialist internationalism come into conflict with Labourism and Stalinism? And why, after two centuries of struggle, does extraordinary private wealth continue to exist beside deprivation in one of the richest cities on earth? Those questions lead beyond the politics of radical remembrance.

Which footprints should be followed?

This is ultimately the contradiction at the heart of the third edition of Rebel Footprints. Rosenberg has produced something genuinely valuable: a counter-map of London. It is a city populated not simply by kings, financiers, property owners and politicians, but by workers, immigrants, women, socialists, democrats and anti-fascists. It reminds the reader that rights presented retrospectively as natural stages in Britain’s peaceful democratic development were secured through bitter struggles.

Yet history provides more than inspiration. It provides warnings. The working class’s greatest defeats did not occur because workers failed to struggle. Frequently they struggled heroically. Defeat resulted when courage and militancy were subordinated to political programmes incapable of challenging capitalist power. That is why revolutionary history cannot finally be reduced to a collection of inspiring rebellions.

London’s radical past contains competing political traditions, not a single progressive inheritance. Chartism, anarchism, parliamentary Labourism, Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism cannot simply be placed together beneath the heading of rebellion. Their differences concerned the most fundamental question of all: which class should hold political power?

In 2026 that question is far from historical. The physical London Rosenberg guides us through has changed drastically. But the social antagonism that produced earlier struggles has not disappeared. Enormous private fortunes coexist with workers struggling with housing and living costs. Migrants are again made scapegoats for crises they did not create. Nationalism is used to divide workers whose interests cross borders.

Rebel Footprints helps recover the memory of those who resisted previous manifestations of these forces. Its limitation is that memory is continually allowed to stand where political explanation is required. Readers should nevertheless take the book onto the streets. Walk the routes. Find the halls, estates, factories, meeting places and battlegrounds. Remember the matchwomen, Chartists, immigrant workers, suffragettes, tenants, socialists and anti-fascists. But their greatest legacy is not the proposition that protest eventually persuades society to become more progressive.

It is that every serious advance of the working class was secured through struggle against entrenched interests, while the decisive question remained the political programme under which that struggle was conducted. The footprints therefore point somewhere Rosenberg does not finally go. They point from protest towards the problem of political power, from radicalism towards socialism, and from the recovery of working-class history towards the necessity of revolutionary and internationalist leadership.

Bibliography

Book under review

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 3rd ed. Foreword by Michael Rosen. London: Pluto Press, 2026. 416 pp. ISBN 9780745351810. [plutobooks.com], [amazon.co.uk]

Earlier editions and related work

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. London: Pluto Press, 2015.

Rosenberg, David. Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London’s Radical History. 2nd ed. Foreword by Ash Sarkar. London: Pluto Press, 2019.

Rosenberg, David. Battle for the East End: Jewish Responses to Fascism in the 1930s. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2011.

Further reading

Branson, Noreen. Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. London: Duckworth, 1975.

Lenin, V. I. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. 1920.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. London: Longmans, 1931.

Piratin, Phil. Our Flag Stays Red. London: Thames Publications, 1948.

Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. London: Robert Anscombe, 1956.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? 1925.

Trotsky, Leon. The Spanish Revolution (1931–39). New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle.”Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904).

“Should America go communist as a result of the difficulties and problems that your capitalist social order is unable to solve, it will discover that communism, far from being an intolerable bureaucratic tyranny and individual regimentation, will be the means of greater individual liberty and shared abundance.”
Leon Trotsky, If America Should Go Communist (1934). [marxists.org]

The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface.” James P. Cannon, Theses on the American Revolution.

“The Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party convenes at a critical turning point in the political history of the United States and the world—the point of intersection of war, economic crisis, and rapidly growing social radicalization.”

David North, An assessment of the decade of socialist revolution and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party, 11 August 2026. [wsws.org]

The New Yorker asks whether American socialism can survive its success. The real question is whether the working class can free itself from the Democratic Party, and from those who call themselves socialists to keep it there.

One week after the 2026 midterm elections, The New Yorker published an essay by Harvard historian Jill Lepore titled “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” Its subtitle states the thesis plainly: the American movement has often watched its ideas flourish while its organisations withered, and the question now is whether today’s resurgence will go the same way.

The framing is revealing, both for what it assumes and for what it leaves out. For the liberal establishment, the problem of socialism is one of institutional durability: membership rolls, mailing lists, and electoral machinery. Socialism is treated as a set of popular “ideas”, free buses, rent freezes and childcare, that drift into the mainstream, while the organisations that carried them fade away. This is presented as a tragic but natural cycle of American political life.

Marxists reject this framework from the outset. Socialism is not a menu of reforms that a capitalist party may or may not adopt. It is the programme for the working class to seize political power and reorganisation of economic life based on social need, not private profit. By that standard, the “success” The New Yorker invites its readers to contemplate is nothing of the kind.

Whose success?

The Nov. 3 midterms trigger the piece. Six candidates backed by the DSA have taken House seats, bringing the total number of self-described democratic socialists in Congress to eight (per CNBC). Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York; Katie Wilson is the mayor of Seattle. Current Affairs has called it ‘Socialism’s Moment’.

But all of these candidates ran as Democrats on the Democratic line, and all of them will be in a Democratic caucus. CNBC’s own report points out that the sheer size of the Democratic majority will severely limit the leverage any of them can exert. In other words, the ‘socialist’ wave has delivered its votes to a party of Wall Street, the military/intelligence complex and the war machine. This party has never been an independent vehicle for the working class’s political interests.

The same report actually makes a more telling point. DSA leaders claim they are having greater success with donors, including wealthy ones, as the organisation continues building its infrastructure ahead of 2028. That is the real measure of the “success” they are celebrating. It is not the growth of working-class consciousness or independent working-class organisation, but the successful integration of a middle-class political layer into the machinery of bourgeois politics.

The same exit poll found that 70% of voters feel the economic system is rigged in favour of the rich. That’s the actual state of play: a very real and growing antagonism towards capitalism exists among tens of millions of workers. The key question is what political outlook and what organisation will give that antagonism a form of conscious expression? DSA’s answer, ‘just vote Democrat,’ is designed to ensure that it never takes on an independent political form.

What really destroyed the organisations

The idea that socialist organisations in America ‘died out’ while their ideas survived is a complete liberal myth. It’s a myth which conveniently ignores the real political reasons for their demise. The SP of Eugene Debs, which pulled in nearly a million votes in 1912, wasn’t just dissolved by some inescapable law of American exceptionalism. It was crushed by state repression. Debs went to prison for anti-war activities. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were the tools of repression used against the anti-war movement, and the Palmer Raids and mass deportations came in the postwar period. Meanwhile, the SP was being torn apart by the impact of the Russian Revolution and the internal struggle between its revolutionary and reformist elements.

In the 1930s, the great industrial struggles that built the CIO, including Minneapolis, Toledo and Flint, demonstrated the immense social power of the American working class. Socialists, communists and other militants played decisive roles. Yet the Stalinised Communist Party, pursuing the Popular Front strategy dictated by Moscow, worked to subordinate this movement to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. The Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party, whose members had played a leading role in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War.

Afterwards, trade unions purged militants and became instruments of Cold War anti-communism and labour-management collaboration. The tendency from which the modern DSA sprang (Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organising Committee, founded in 1973 and absorbed into DSA in 1982) was based on the idea of ‘realigning’ or ‘transforming’ the Democratic Party rather than creating an independent revolutionary party of the working class.

The lesson of this history is not that socialist organisations are inherently weak. It is that the constant subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics has repeatedly killed off the prospect of the working class ever becoming an independent political force. The social reforms that did survive (Social Security, labour rights, Medicare, etc.) were all concessions taken from American capitalism under the pressure of the times. They were not evidence of capitalism evolving into socialism. The fact that both Democrats and Republicans eventually rolled them back is the very definition of the opposite.

City Hall and the limits of “sewer socialism”

New York was the flagship of the new movement. Mamdani was elected on a platform of initiatives including fast and free buses, a rent freeze for rent-stabilised tenants, and universal childcare. In June, after appointing six of its nine members, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze one- and two-year stabilised leases from October 2026 to September 2027.

No worker will begrudge tenants a bit of relief from rising rents. It is important to be clear, though, that this is not socialism. A temporary freeze on rents in the regulated part of the market doesn’t change capitalist ownership of land, housing and finance. The property developers, landlords, banks, and other financial interests at the heart of the housing system remain exactly as they are.

Mamdani himself has referred to the municipal socialist tradition in Milwaukee and the so-called ‘sewer socialists’. That tradition was largely about efficient municipal administration and the provision of public services. Any improvements such policies may bring about remain within the realm of municipal reform. They don’t, in any way, eliminate capitalist property or transfer political power to the working class.

New York is still one of the great centres of world capitalism. No municipal administration, however well-intentioned in its reform programme, can transform the class relations institutionalised on Wall Street, since those relations go far beyond the municipal boundary and rest on ownership of the means of production.

This isn’t really a question of individual treachery or individual sincerity. It’s a question of programme. A movement that takes responsibility for administering capitalism has to operate within the economic, political, and legal framework of that administration. Eventually, workers’ interests will run up against the demands that finance, property, and the state make of that administration.

The historical experience of reformist governments internationally, from SYRIZA in Greece to ostensibly left administrations elsewhere, therefore demands serious examination. Winning office and possessing political power are not the same thing.

Ideas without a programme, organisation without independence

The New Yorker’s formula, ideas flourish while organisations wither, should therefore be turned on its head. The central problem is not that American socialists have been organisationally incapable of sustaining attractive reforms. It is that organisations claiming the socialist mantle have repeatedly rejected the working class’s political independence.

DSA is not an independent working-class political party. It operates overwhelmingly through the Democratic Party and organises electoral campaigns for candidates who stand within that party. This contradiction became especially stark during the 2022 railroad dispute, when Congress intervened and imposed a contract on rail workers, preventing a national strike.

An organisation cannot overcome this contradiction merely by increasing its membership, fundraising capacity or representation in elected institutions. Organisational growth and socialist political development are entirely different things. Indeed, under definite conditions the first can proceed at the expense of the second.

The question “Can socialism survive its success?” is therefore posed falsely. What may unquestionably survive is a political apparatus possessing elected representatives, campaign funds, professional staff and positions within existing institutions. But an organisation that grows by integrating itself ever more deeply into the capitalist political structure is not necessarily succeeding as a socialist movement. It may instead be abandoning the historical content of socialism while retaining its name.

What the discussion leaves out

A discussion of American socialism in November 2026 that confines itself to elections and organisational longevity necessarily passes over the decisive questions confronting the working class.

The first is war. American capitalism remains at the centre of an international system characterised by sharpening geopolitical conflicts and enormous military expenditures. Socialism cannot be reduced to domestic redistribution while foreign policy and militarism are treated as separate questions. Opposition to imperialist war belongs at the centre of a genuinely international socialist programme.

The second question is the defence of democratic rights. The growth of authoritarian forms of rule cannot be separated from extreme social inequality and the political crisis it generates. A ruling class confronted by growing social opposition increasingly regards democratic forms as obstacles to securing its interests. The defence of democratic rights therefore depends upon the independent mobilisation of the working class rather than confidence in the institutions or representatives of either capitalist party.

Third is the working class’s international character. Workers in New York and Seattle confront corporations, banks, financial markets and supply chains extending across national boundaries. Their conditions of life are inseparable from those of workers in London, São Paulo, Shenzhen and throughout the world economy. There is consequently no national, still less municipal, road to socialism.

Finally, there is the rank and file. The more significant development is not simply the election of a handful of politicians presenting themselves as democratic socialists but the emergence of struggles by workers against employers and, increasingly, against trade-union bureaucracies seeking to contain those struggles. Socialist politics must seek to develop the working class’s independent initiative and organisation. These are the conditions in which the socialist question is actually posed: not principally as the popularity of individual reforms, but as a question of class power.

The question that should be asked

The real question is not whether American socialism can survive its success. It is whether the American working class will break politically with the Democratic Party and construct its own revolutionary political leadership on an internationalist and socialist programme.

Widespread hostility to inequality, declining living standards, and the domination of political life by immense concentrations of wealth provide an objective basis for such a development. But hostility towards capitalism does not spontaneously become socialist consciousness. Nor will it reach socialism through the electoral structures of the Democratic Party, the fundraising apparatus of DSA or the administration of municipal reforms.

It requires the conscious assimilation of the strategic experiences of the American and international working class throughout the twentieth century, including the Russian Revolution, the degeneration of the Soviet Union, the rise of Stalinism, the Popular Front, fascism, the betrayal of revolutionary opportunities and the prolonged struggle waged by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International against Stalinism and reformism.

This is precisely what disappears when socialism is reduced to the history of organisations, policies and electoral cycles. The fundamental historical question is not why particular socialist organisations disappeared. It is what programme they fought for, what class interests they represented and, above all, what political relationship they established between the working class and the capitalist state. The New Yorker worries that socialist organisations may wither once again. The working class should draw a very different lesson from this history. It is time to build the organisation that will not.

Bibliography

Articles and reports

Guttenplan, D. D. “The Rapid-Fire Political Education of Zohran Mamdani.” The Nation, 12 May 2026.

Izaguirre, Anthony. “Rent Board Fulfils Mamdani’s Vow to Freeze the Rent on 1 Million NYC Apartments.” Associated Press, 25 June 2026.

Lepore, Jill. “Can American Socialism Survive Its Success?” The New Yorker, 9 November 2026.

“America Doesn’t Like Socialism, but the Candidates Keep Winning.” CNBC, 7 November 2026.

“Socialism’s Moment Is Here.” Current Affairs, 2026.

“NYC Rent Guidelines Board Final Vote.” NY1, 25 June 2026.

Books

Cannon, James P. Socialism on Trial. New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942.

Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. New York: Monad Press, 1972.

Harrington, Michael. Socialism. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.

Isserman, Maurice. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. New York: PublicAffairs, 2000.

Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program). 1938.

Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

A personal library assembled over fifty years is more than a collection of books. It is a material record of intellectual and political development. Moving it to new premises marks the beginning of another stage in a writing project rooted in the history of Marxism, the Trotskyist movement, and the struggle to understand the great revolutionary experiences of the working class.

Over the coming months I will begin packing up my library and moving it into premises more commensurate with its size. A conservative estimate puts the collection at around 2,000 volumes, accumulated over half a century. What might appear from the outside as the relatively mundane business of boxing books, moving shelves and reorganising a workspace has inevitably assumed a more personal and political significance.

To dismantle a library is to excavate one’s own intellectual history. Books encountered decades ago reappear. Forgotten arguments return. The circumstances under which particular works were bought suddenly return. Each shelf corresponds to a period of life and, in my case, to a stage in a political development that began in a London comprehensive school during the 1970s and proceeded, through more than one false start and political dead end, towards Marxism and Trotskyism.

I never assembled the library primarily for possession’s sake. I have never regarded myself as a bibliophile in the conventional sense. These books were acquired because I wanted to understand something: why society takes the form it does, why capitalism has survived despite the suffering and inequality it produces, why revolutionary movements have succeeded or failed, why Stalinism arose in the Soviet Union, and above all how the experiences of previous generations of workers and revolutionaries bear upon the problems confronting the working class today. That process began not with Marx, Lenin or Trotsky, but with the novel.

Pimlico Comprehensive and the Working-Class Novel

The first books I bought seriously were set texts at Pimlico Comprehensive School when I was 16. Among the writers I encountered were Alan Sillitoe, Carson McCullers, Keith Waterhouse, Shelagh Delaney and Stan Barstow. They occupy only a small physical space in a library that subsequently expanded into thousands of volumes, but their intellectual significance was considerable.

These writers emerged from, or sought to represent, social worlds largely excluded from the respectable version of post-war society. Sillitoe’s factory workers, Delaney’s Salford, Barstow’s West Riding and the lonely and marginalised figures inhabiting McCullers’s American South opened up experiences remote from the official culture presented by newspapers, television and the political establishment.

For a working-class teenager, the effect was considerable. Literature revealed that the experiences surrounding you could themselves become the subject of serious art. But it simultaneously raised problems it could not resolve. Why were people’s lives organised in this way? Why did some possess wealth and power while others sold their labour merely to live? Why did class determine so much about an individual’s possibilities?

The best of these novels registered the human consequences of class society with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, literature by itself could not provide a scientific explanation of the social relations producing those consequences. That required an encounter with history and politics. Those first books were therefore instrumental in my movement towards the left. Half a century later, they remain on my shelves.

Militant, Stalinism and Trotsky’s History

Once politics became a serious interest, my book-buying accelerated dramatically. The Militant Tendency, then operating within the Labour Party, maintained an extensive book catalogue, and I began ordering from it with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually spent more than £1,000, a substantial sum at the time. The scale of my purchases evidently attracted someone’s attention because two young Militant members were eventually dispatched to my door to recruit me.

My membership lasted approximately six months. The promise of socialism attracted me. What proved inadequate was Militant’s political perspective, centred on transforming the Labour Party into an instrument for socialist change. The organisation treated the existing labour movement as a vehicle through which socialism would somehow emerge, rather than subjecting it to the historical and political examination its own record demanded.

The books survived my membership. Most remain in the library. I subsequently joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, searching again for a political organisation capable of explaining capitalism and providing a strategy for its overthrow. That experience lasted another six months. It was enough. There is perhaps some historical justice in the fact that, while the library contains materials from virtually every other period of my political development, it contains no books from my brief membership of the Stalinist Communist Party.

The decisive intellectual influence of these years came from an entirely different political tradition. At 17 I read Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Few books I have encountered subsequently have equalled its impact. Here history was no longer presented principally as the actions of governments, ministers and celebrated individuals. Trotsky reconstructed revolution as a living process in which millions of human beings entered history consciously.

The events of 1917 emerged neither as a conspiracy nor as the inevitable outcome of impersonal forces. The Russian Revolution was presented as an immense confrontation of classes, parties and programmes, in which objective conditions created revolutionary possibilities but political leadership ultimately determined whether those possibilities were realised. Trotsky’s work demonstrated what Marxist historical writing could achieve. It united the reconstruction of events with an analysis of the class forces underlying them and, above all, with an understanding of the decisive role of revolutionary consciousness and leadership.

The implications extended far beyond 1917. If the October Revolution represented the working class’s conscious seizure of power under Bolshevik leadership, then Stalinism could not be identified with Bolshevism. The bureaucratic regime that subsequently emerged required a historical explanation. Trotsky provided that explanation through his struggle against the degeneration of the Soviet state and the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. Reading the History was therefore decisive in making me a Marxist. It also gave me an intellectual starting point for understanding why the crimes committed under Stalin represented not the fulfilment of October but its bureaucratic betrayal.

The WRP, the Redgrave Books and One Long Night

The library’s next major expansion came after I joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1982. My period of candidate membership lasted an entire year, which I have sometimes thought might qualify as a minor record in the history of revolutionary politics. I bought extensively during these years, and much of that material remains in the collection. The books from this period have acquired an additional historical significance because they belong to the years immediately preceding the crisis that erupted in 1985 inside the WRP and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

One of the largest single additions to my library came shortly before that split. I was told that Vanessa Redgrave was moving house and needed to dispose of a substantial quantity of books. I bought many of them. These volumes now occupy a peculiar position within the collection. Whatever their original provenance, they became part of my own intellectual history at precisely the point when major political questions concerning the history and programme of the Trotskyist movement were coming sharply to the surface.

Among the books I value most highly is a proof copy of Maria Joffe’s One Long Night. Joffe, widow of the Soviet diplomat and Left Oppositionist Adolph Joffe, endured decades of imprisonment and persecution under Stalinism. Her memoir belongs to the documentary record of the destruction of the revolutionary generation associated with October and of those who continued to resist bureaucratic reaction.

Such books matter because the struggle over historical memory is itself political. Stalinism could not consolidate its rule by physically destroying its opponents alone. It had to falsify the historical record, erase individuals from revolutionary history and transform the October Revolution into something compatible with the interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Trotskyism survived under extraordinarily difficult conditions because it defended not simply particular individuals or organisational traditions, but the international socialist programme upon which the Russian Revolution had been based.

A library containing this literature is therefore more than an accumulation of political texts. It preserves traces of struggles that the defenders of the existing order, including its Stalinist and reformist representatives, repeatedly proclaimed finished. They were not finished.

Birkbeck, the English Revolution and Historical Writing

The library’s largest sustained expansion began with my studies at Birkbeck and the completion of my degree in 2003. At that point another strand of intellectual development became central: the seventeenth-century English Revolution.

I had written a dissertation on the subject which, with the benefit of hindsight, was not particularly good. But dissatisfaction can sometimes have more productive consequences than satisfaction. The attempt to find somewhere for my essays eventually contributed to the creation of my website and, from there, to a much more sustained programme of historical reading and writing.

The consequences for the bookshelves were dramatic. Probably around half of the present collection, roughly a thousand books, dates from this broad period. The shelves expanded to encompass the English Revolution, the Civil War, the Levellers and other radical movements, the development of Parliament, religious and political conflict, and the immense historiographical controversies surrounding the seventeenth century.

But the subject could never be confined to the seventeenth century itself. Serious study of the English Revolution raises fundamental questions about historical interpretation. Was it a revolution? What social forces produced it? What relationship existed between political and religious ideas and the material interests of contending classes? How should we understand the Levellers and other radical currents? What was the upheaval’s international significance?

Behind these questions lay the still larger issue of historical materialism.

The study of history is never politically innocent. The assault upon Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution did not take place independently of the broader ideological offensive against Marxism during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Historical controversies reflected, in mediated form, the political climate produced by the defeats of the working class, the degeneration of the old labour organisations and eventually the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

My library’s expansion consequently followed the development of these controversies. Books led to other books. Footnotes opened previously unknown arguments. Historiographical disagreements demanded investigation of the political assumptions underlying apparently specialised academic disputes. What began with a relatively poor undergraduate dissertation gradually became a continuing engagement with the relationship between historical scholarship and contemporary politics.

Books as the Material Record of a Political Development

Seen together, the 2,000 volumes therefore amount to something quite different from a conventional private collection. The Sillitoe and Delaney volumes bought as a schoolboy belong to the discovery that working-class experience could become a legitimate subject of literature. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution belongs to the discovery that those experiences could be scientifically understood as part of the historical struggle of classes. The literature accumulated through Militant, the Communist Party and the WRP records the search for a political movement capable of acting upon that understanding. The books acquired after Birkbeck record another development: the attempt to write history rather than consume it.

False starts marked that journey. Some books were undoubtedly bought and deserved to remain unread, and others were read more carefully than they deserved. Political development never proceeds in the straight line imposed upon it retrospectively. One investigates tendencies that lead nowhere, accepts arguments subsequently rejected, and only gradually acquires the historical experience necessary to distinguish what is essential from what is secondary. The value of a serious political library lies partly in the fact that it preserves these stages rather than concealing them.

Artificial Intelligence and a New Stage

The most recent development introduces another element into this history. Artificial intelligence has altered the technical conditions under which an individual can undertake historical and political research. Like every major technological innovation under capitalism, AI is developing within definite class relations. Corporations and governments approach it, above all, from the standpoint of profitability, labour displacement, surveillance, competitive advantage, and the intensification of exploitation. There is nothing inherently emancipatory about technology operating within capitalist property relations. But a Marxist response does not consist of recoiling from technological development. The productive forces created by capitalism repeatedly come into conflict with the social relations within which they develop. The task is to understand both technology’s emancipatory potential and the class interests that determine its present use.

For an individual engaged in historical research, the possibilities are already considerable. Vast quantities of material can be searched and compared far more rapidly than previously. Bibliographical trails can be followed more efficiently. Arguments drawn from different periods and historiographical traditions can be related to one another. Research that once required weeks of preliminary investigation can sometimes be organised in a fraction of that time. That does not abolish the necessity for knowledge. On the contrary, the ability to evaluate material becomes more important. A machine can locate relationships between texts, but it cannot substitute for the political and historical understanding required to determine which relationships matter, which claims withstand examination and what social interests underlie competing interpretations.

After fifty years of reading, that distinction is crucial. For the first time, I feel able to research and write articles at a level approaching the political and historical understanding accumulated through decades of reading and political experience. AI has not produced that understanding. The books did. Political experience did. Historical study did. The technology makes it possible to mobilise that accumulated knowledge with a speed and breadth that were previously extraordinarily difficult for an individual writer working largely alone.

The Library as a Working Archive

This is the significance of moving the library. Over the coming months, the books will be packed, transported and reorganised in a small office where they can function properly as a working research collection. The change is practical, but it also marks the start of a new stage in the website’s development. The intention is not to preserve the collection as a monument to fifty years of reading. Libraries become intellectually useless when they become mausoleums. Books justify the space they occupy when they continue to be read, questioned, compared and used.

The shelves that began with Sillitoe, Delaney, Barstow and McCullers at Pimlico Comprehensive eventually acquired Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky; the documentary history of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration; the literature of the Fourth International; materials from the WRP years; and an extensive collection dealing with the English Revolution, its radical movements and the historiographical battles through which its meaning has been contested.

What links them is not uniformity, because they contain writers representing every conceivable political and historical standpoint. What unites the collection is the struggle to understand history. Moving 2,000 books will be physically exhausting. But politically and intellectually the move represents precisely the opposite of winding things down. It prepares me for more work. The books accumulated through fifty years of reading are no longer simply the record of how I arrived at my present standpoint. Properly organised and combined with the possibilities opened by new technology, they can become the working archive for a considerably expanded programme of historical and political writing.

The journey that began with working-class novels read at Pimlico Comprehensive, passed through the first encounter with Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, the experiences of the revolutionary movement, and decades spent studying the English Revolution, therefore continues. Packing the library is not an act of putting the past away. It prepares for what comes next.

The republication of a 1972 Soviet polemic against Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International provides an opportunity to reconsider the political function of anti-Trotskyism within Stalinist ideology and the historical fate of the bureaucracy that produced it. Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature was not simply an academic assessment of a rival political tendency. It was part of a broader campaign in which the Soviet bureaucracy sought to discredit Trotskyism and suppress the historical significance of the Left Opposition’s struggle against Stalinism. The persistence of such polemics decades after Trotsky’s assassination showed the bureaucracy’s continued sensitivity to a Marxist critique that challenged its claim to represent the political continuity of the October Revolution.

The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gives these arguments an additional historical significance. The bureaucracy that proclaimed Trotskyism politically bankrupt ultimately presided over the destruction of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism. Basmanov’s work should therefore be read today primarily as a document of Stalinist political ideology, revealing how the Soviet apparatus sought to answer an opposition whose analysis of bureaucracy, nationalism and the danger of capitalist restoration raised questions that official Soviet historiography could never satisfactorily resolve.

Who was Mikhail Basmanov?

Biographical information on Basmanov is surprisingly scarce in readily available sources. We can establish with greater certainty his political and literary role in the Soviet ideological apparatus. He was a specialist writer on Trotskyism, and his best-known work, Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature, was published in English by Moscow’s Progress Publishers in 1972 under the auspices of the CPSU Central Committee’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

The circumstances of the book’s production are particularly revealing. The publisher of the new edition describes Basmanov as a “professional in the genre” of Soviet anti-Trotskyist literature and connects the book with a 1971 directive by CPSU Central Committee Secretary Ponomarev calling for an ideological offensive against Trotskyism. Contemporary Trotskyism therefore cannot be approached simply as an academic historian’s independent scholarship. Its original title page explicitly identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU, while its chapters attack Trotsky, permanent revolution, the Fourth International and contemporary Trotskyist organisations from the standpoint of official Soviet ideology.

David North and the Stalinist falsification of Trotskyism

Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism becomes clearer when placed within the broader tradition of historical falsification examined by David North. North’s defence of Trotsky has repeatedly insisted that attacks upon Trotsky cannot be separated from the political struggle over the historical meaning of the October Revolution, the rise of Stalinism and the fate of the Soviet Union. His In Defence of Leon Trotsky, for example, challenges what he regards as the transmission of Stalinist distortions into contemporary historical writing. The WSWS presentation of the Russian edition described the book as a refutation of attacks by British historians upon Trotsky’s political and intellectual legacy and explicitly connected these controversies with the earlier Stalinist falsification of Soviet history. [wsws.org]

This provides an important framework within which to read Basmanov. The essential issue is not whether we can dismiss every factual assertion in Contemporary Trotskyism because its author wrote within the official Soviet ideological apparatus. The more profound question concerns the political method by which Trotskyism is defined. Rather than beginning with Trotsky’s programme and historical writings and examining their relationship to the major experiences of the twentieth-century working class, the Stalinist polemical tradition began by identifying the Soviet bureaucracy with socialism. Opposition to that bureaucracy could consequently be represented as opposition to the Soviet Union and, ultimately, as counter-revolution.

North’s writings approach the question from the opposite standpoint. In a 2024 speech commemorating Trotsky’s exile on Büyükada, he situated Trotsky’s historical importance particularly in relation to the defeat of the German working class, the rise of Nazism and Stalinist betrayals in Germany, France and Spain. He argued that understanding these historical defeats remains necessary to confronting contemporary political problems. This emphasis on historical experience exposes the fundamental weakness of Basmanov’s method. Trotskyism must be judged not by the denunciatory vocabulary of official Soviet ideology but by examining the policies for which Trotsky and his opponents actually fought. [wsws.org]

The contrast became still more important after 1991. The bureaucracy that had declared Trotskyism historically bankrupt presided over the Soviet Union’s final crisis and dissolution. The WSWS account of the Russian publication of In Defence of Leon Trotsky explicitly links the Soviet Union’s fate to the historical struggle between Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and Stalinism, arguing that contemporary political questions in Russia cannot be understood apart from that history. Whatever judgement one ultimately reaches about North’s political conclusions, this is a question that any retrospective defence of the official Soviet attack on Trotskyism must answer. [wsws.org]

In this context, republishing Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature offers more than antiquarian interest. The Soviet attack on Trotsky did not disappear with the state apparatus that produced it. Stalinist distortions of Trotsky and the Russian Revolution continued to find expression long after the USSR’s dissolution. Basmanov’s book, now republished with a critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, deserves attention because it preserves, in unusually concentrated form, the political methods the Soviet bureaucracy used to discredit Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International.

The book’s historical provenance is unmistakable. Contemporary Trotskyism appeared in English from Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1972 and carried on its title page the attribution “Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU”. Its chapters announce the political character of the work before the argument has properly begun: “How the Trotskyites Permanently Fought Against the Revolution”, “A Scornful Attitude to the Peasantry”, “The Ideological Collapse of Trotskyism”, and “How the ‘Fourth International’ Was Hammered Together and What Came of It”.

This was not history written from an academic distance. It was political propaganda produced by an official institution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against the revolutionary tendency whose leading representatives had been persecuted and physically annihilated by the Stalinist bureaucracy during the preceding decades. The circumstances surrounding its production underline this character. The publisher of the new edition states that, in Kommunist no. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, called for exposing Trotskyism’s supposed connections with anti-communism and right- and left-wing opportunism. It describes Basmanov’s volume as executing that political directive “at book length”. Contemporary Trotskyism’s interest, therefore, lies far less in what it can tell readers about Trotskyism than in what it reveals about Stalinism.

Why 1972?

The date of publication is essential to understanding the book. Basmanov was writing in the aftermath of a period of enormous international political upheaval. The revolutionary crisis in France in May-June 1968, the struggles surrounding the Prague Spring, mass international opposition to the Vietnam War, and the political radicalisation of a new generation transformed the political atmosphere in Europe and beyond.

Even Basmanov could not simply ignore this process. The opening of his book describes the period as one of profound revolutionary change, specifically citing intensifying class struggle in advanced capitalist countries and the emergence of students and parts of the intelligentsia as active political forces. The new publisher draws attention to an even more revealing feature of the original. Basmanov himself acknowledged that, after supposedly being defeated during the 1920s and 1930s, Trotskyist movements began to revive from the 1950s onward. The publisher argues that the intensity of the Soviet polemic reflected the growth of the Fourth International and other radical tendencies among workers and students after 1968.

This contradiction runs through the whole enterprise. The Soviet bureaucracy insisted that Trotskyism was politically bankrupt, historically discredited and without a significant social base. Yet it continued to devote considerable ideological resources to combating it. The very existence of Contemporary Trotskyism is therefore evidence that the bureaucracy did not regard Trotsky’s political heritage with the indifference appropriate to a genuinely dead tendency.

Basmanov’s subsequent work makes the anxiety still clearer. In 1973 the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow published his Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, an English-language pamphlet of roughly 100 pages dealing explicitly with Trotskyism, political activity and youth. The title itself tells us something important. The bureaucracy was no longer merely conducting retrospective arguments about disputes from the 1920s. It was concerned with the influence of Trotskyist ideas upon a contemporary younger generation.

The method of the Stalinist school of falsification

The organisational structure of Contemporary Trotskyism displays the characteristic method of official Soviet anti-Trotskyism. Permanent revolution becomes an alleged rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the peasantry. Opposition to the Stalinist programme of socialism in one country becomes disbelief in socialism itself. The Soviet bureaucracy identifies opposition to its diplomatic manoeuvres and political betrayals as hostility to the Soviet Union.

The table of contents demonstrates the procedure particularly clearly. Basmanov moves from supposed Trotskyist hostility to the peasantry to the “rejection” of socialism in one country, the alleged ideological collapse of Trotskyism and finally the claim that contemporary Trotskyism was undermining the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.

The method is significant. Political disagreements are not analysed according to their actual historical content. Instead, opposition to the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy is progressively identified with opposition to socialism itself. The bureaucratic leadership is thereby transformed from a historically specific political stratum into the personification of socialism, and criticism of the bureaucracy becomes by definition counter-revolutionary. This ideological formula had justified persecuting the Left Opposition long before Basmanov wrote his book.

Consequently, this framework pushed aside the historical questions that might have discredited it. What was the social basis of bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union? Why did Lenin, in the final period of his political life, express increasing alarm over the growth of bureaucratic tendencies? What political meaning did the theory of socialism in one country have, which had never formed part of the Bolshevik Party programme before 1924? What explained the catastrophic policies pursued by the Communist International in Britain, China and Germany? And why did the Soviet leadership undertake the physical extermination of so large a section of the revolutionary generation that had led the October Revolution?

These questions lead directly to writings that official Soviet polemics could not answer through historical investigation alone: Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, his writings on Germany and the rise of fascism, and, above all, The Revolution Betrayed.

The fundamental political significance of The Revolution Betrayed lay in Trotsky’s attempt to explain the Soviet Union’s contradictions from a Marxist standpoint. He rejected both the Stalinist identification of the bureaucracy with socialism and the claim that the October Revolution had created another form of capitalism. He instead characterised the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state in which the social gains represented by nationalised property coexisted with a parasitic bureaucratic caste exercising political power. Whether that analysis was correct is a historical and political question requiring serious examination. Basmanov instead begins from the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy and evaluates its opponents accordingly.

The shadow of the Moscow Trials

A deeper historical continuity is involved. Basmanov’s 1972 language was less murderous than that of the Great Terror, but the basic political logic had changed far less than the softer terminology suggested. Trotskyism continued to be presented not as a Marxist tendency whose political analysis might be right or wrong, but as a fundamentally anti-revolutionary phenomenon serving forces hostile to socialism.

That accusation was central to the Stalinist campaign against the Left Opposition. During the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, former leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were accused of extraordinary conspiracies and subsequently executed. Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, was made the central political defendant in absentia.

The twentieth-century history of Stalinism therefore cannot be separated from the history of anti-Trotskyism. Opposition to Trotsky was not one ideological feature among many. It played an essential role in destroying the political memory of the October Revolution and establishing a new official version of Soviet history in which Stalin’s emergence appeared as the legitimate continuation of Bolshevism.

The contradiction became particularly striking after Nikita Khrushchev denounced parts of Stalin’s record. Once it was conceded that crimes on an enormous scale had been committed, an obvious question followed. What of the political opposition that had fought the bureaucracy before those crimes reached their height? Answering that question required reconsidering the history of the Left Opposition itself.

What Basmanov cannot explain

Basmanov’s book’s decisive weakness follows from its political purpose. To acknowledge Trotskyism as a genuine Marxist opposition to bureaucratic domination would have required reopening the basic political struggles through which the Stalinist regime consolidated itself. This problem extends beyond Trotsky personally. The history of the Fourth International after his assassination posed equally difficult questions for Soviet apologetics.

Particularly important was the 1953 conflict within the Fourth International associated with the tendency headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The issue was not simply one more organisational split among left-wing groups. At the centre of the conflict was a debate over the historical role of Stalinism and other bureaucratic and nationalist formations.

For an official Soviet polemicist, treating all these conflicting tendencies as undifferentiated “Trotskyism” was politically convenient. The distinctions disappeared, and with them disappeared the awkward fact that one of the central conflicts within postwar Trotskyism concerned precisely whether revolutionary Marxists should adapt themselves politically to the Stalinist bureaucracies and allied movements.

The homogenisation of politically hostile tendencies therefore performs an ideological function. It lets Basmanov construct “Trotskyism” as a single counter-revolutionary phenomenon rather than examine the historical struggles through which different movements claiming the Trotskyist inheritance evolved.

A surprisingly useful primary source

However, Basmanov’s work contains an irony that the publisher of the new edition itself emphasises. Unlike many polemics in this genre, Contemporary Trotskyism quotes extensively from the publications of the movements it attacks. The publisher calls it unusually well documented for a Soviet source on the post-1968 radical left, noting its references to publications from several countries.

This gives the book a secondary value quite different from the one its author intended. It can be read as evidence of what the Soviet bureaucracy monitored, which tendencies it considered threatening, and how its ideological institutions tried to categorise developments on the international left.

The book is therefore potentially illuminating when approached against the grain. The reader should ask not merely, “What does Basmanov say about the Trotskyists?” but “Why was an institution of the CPSU commissioning and publishing this argument in 1972?” Seen in this way, the polemical excess becomes historical evidence.

History’s verdict

The greatest problem confronting Basmanov’s argument emerged after he published his book. Trotsky insisted that bureaucratic rule did not provide a stable path to socialism. His conception of political revolution stemmed from the contradiction between the nationalised property relations produced by the October Revolution and the bureaucracy’s political domination. In his analysis, defending the social foundations created by October required the Soviet working class to remove the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy.

The ultimate fate of the Soviet Union therefore poses a decisive historical question: which analysis more penetratingly captured Soviet society’s contradictions, the bureaucracy’s apologetics or the Marxist opposition to it? The state whose political invincibility was assumed throughout official Soviet literature disappeared in 1991. The CPSU ceased to rule. The Soviet Union was dissolved, and capitalist property relations were restored across the former USSR.

This does not mean that every prediction made by every tendency describing itself as Trotskyist was vindicated. Nor does the collapse of the USSR automatically settle every controversy over Soviet history. But it does require the central claims of official Soviet ideology to be subjected to an accounting that Contemporary Trotskyism, for obvious chronological reasons, could never make. The bureaucratic order Basmanov defended did not provide a stable and irreversible transition to communism. Its political institutions proved incapable of preventing capitalism’s restoration.

This is why Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin’s work matters in any retrospective assessment of Basmanov. In his multi-volume Was There an Alternative?, Rogovin reconstructed the history of the Left Opposition and the struggle against Stalinism as a real political conflict rather than treating the bureaucracy’s ascendancy as the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. The very title posed the historical question that decades of official Soviet historiography had sought to suppress: was Stalinism the unavoidable development of Bolshevism, or did a Marxist alternative exist?

From this perspective, the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be relegated to a dispute between personalities or rival factions. It concerned the international strategy of the socialist revolution, the relationship between Soviet economic development and world revolution, the nature of socialist democracy and, ultimately, whether the bureaucratic regime would defend or undermine the social foundations established in October 1917.

The new introduction

The 2026 edition’s distinguishing feature is Dmitry Chasovennikov’s introduction. The available evidence here requires an important correction to the assumption that the reissue straightforwardly represents an attempt to revive Basmanov’s political standpoint. The publisher explicitly describes the new introduction as “written from inside the tradition the book sets out to bury” and presents Basmanov’s book as “Moscow’s book-length answer to the post-1968 growth of the Fourth International”. Amazon reproduces substantially the same description, characterising the original as a Soviet attack on Trotsky, the Fourth International and the far left. [amazon.co.uk]

That substantially changes how the republication should be evaluated. On the evidence available from the publisher, the book is being presented not simply as a restored Stalinist polemic for contemporary use but as a historically situated document accompanied by a critical introduction. Nevertheless, one important question remains that the publisher’s promotional description alone cannot settle: how far does Chasovennikov’s introduction pursue the historical implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the archival record of Stalinist repression, and the political disputes inside the Fourth International? Without the complete text of the introduction, it would be unjustified to attribute specific answers to him.

The responsible criticism, therefore, is not to pretend that the new editor endorses Basmanov. The more interesting question is what contemporary readers can learn from republishing the book as an historical document.

Why republish it now?

On that basis, there is a legitimate reason to make Contemporary Trotskyism available again. Stalinist anti-Trotskyism deserves historical study. So do the institutions that manufactured it, the political vocabulary they employed and the historical episodes they systematically distorted or suppressed.

Indeed, the publisher’s framing unintentionally makes the book particularly suitable for such a reading. It notes that Basmanov’s polemic followed Ponomarev’s 1971 directive, stresses the political circumstances of its appearance, and explicitly characterises the volume as a response to the revival of revolutionary currents after the late 1960s.

Read critically, therefore, Contemporary Trotskyism can illuminate a significant episode in the ideological history of the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet bureaucracy understood the challenge revolutionary movements posed to its left and how it sought to inoculate Communist Party members and sympathisers against Trotsky’s political legacy. But precisely because of this, the book should never be read in isolation.

Readers seeking to understand these controversies should place Basmanov alongside the principal documents produced by the people he attacks. They should read Trotsky on permanent revolution, the Communist International, the German catastrophe, the Soviet bureaucracy and the founding of the Fourth International. They should investigate the Moscow Trials and the subsequent historical and documentary record. They should examine the conflicts within the Fourth International rather than accepting an omnibus category called “Trotskyism”.Above all, they should compare the rival historical perspectives with what actually happened.

A museum piece, but an instructive one

The most striking feature of Contemporary Trotskyism today is the disappearance of the political world from which it spoke with such institutional confidence. Basmanov wrote from within an enormous state and party apparatus that declared itself the authoritative embodiment of Marxism-Leninism and treated Trotskyism as a defeated deviation relegated to history. Yet the CPSU and the Soviet Union are themselves gone.

The political questions Trotsky fought over have not disappeared with them. The relationship between nationalism and international socialism, the political independence of the working class, the dangers of bureaucracy, the character of revolutionary leadership and the relationship between socialist revolution and democracy remain indispensable questions for anyone attempting to understand the twentieth century or the crisis of contemporary capitalism.

That is the final irony surrounding Basmanov’s resurrection. His book sought to demonstrate that Trotskyism belonged to the past. Half a century later, Basmanov’s polemic returns primarily as a historical artefact from a vanished political apparatus.

The new edition can therefore perform a useful service, provided it is read critically and historically. Approach contemporary Trotskyism not as an authoritative guide to Trotsky or the Fourth International, but as a primary source for understanding how the Soviet bureaucracy represented its Marxist opponents in the last decades of its existence.

And there is an appropriate way to test its claims. Read Basmanov. Then read Trotsky. Read the Left Opposition documents and the political conflicts within the Fourth International. Read the archival scholarship produced after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Finally, set the conflicting analyses against the history that followed.

That historical comparison transforms this republished polemic from an attack on Trotskyism into an unintended document of the political order against which Trotskyism fought.

Bibliography

Primary text

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. The digitised original identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU and confirms the 1972 English printing. [archive.org]

Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: With a New Critical Introduction. Introduction by Chasovennikov. Progress Publishers Library, 2026. The electronic edition is listed as appearing in September 2026. [progresspu…ishers.org], [fnac.com]

Basmanov, Mikhail. Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1973. [openlibrary.org]

Trotsky and the Left Opposition

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1928.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution. 1938.

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

Stalinism and the historical struggle over Trotskyism

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. Oxford University Press, 1954.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. Oxford University Press, 1959.

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. Oxford University Press, 1963.

Rogovin, Vadim. Was There an Alternative? Multi-volume study of the Left Opposition, Stalinism and the political struggles in the Soviet Union.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.

Further reading

Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.

Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin. 1937.

Sedov, Leon. The Red Book on the Moscow Trials. 1936.

John Kelly’s Trade Unions and Socialist Politics appeared in 1988, three years after the defeat of the British miners’ strike and amid the organised labour movement’s continuing retreat under the Thatcher government. It targeted a growing body of opinion among left academics, Communist Party intellectuals, and trade union officials who argued that changes in the working-class composition, declining trade union membership, and Thatcherism’s electoral victories had rendered the traditional politics of class struggle obsolete. Verso’s description confirms that Kelly explicitly challenged claims that unions were in chronic decline or had exhausted their progressive potential, calling such arguments based on “poor sociology and bad history”.

Kelly sets himself two fundamental questions. What kinds of trade union strategy are most likely to develop political class consciousness among workers? And what role could such strategies play in a transition to socialism? These are serious questions, and Kelly treats them with a seriousness absent from much of the literature generated by the demoralised British left of the late 1980s. The book is extensively researched and draws on historical material, strike statistics, surveys, and the writings of classical Marxists. Yet the volume’s fundamental weakness is that it keeps these questions within the political horizons of the existing trade union apparatus and the Labour Party. Nearly four decades later, the fate of these organisations provides an objective test of the perspective advanced in 1988. That test has not favoured Kelly’s conclusions.

Kelly’s argument

The book examines the classical Marxist literature on trade unionism before considering the political and strategic problems confronting British unions during the 1980s. Kelly begins with Marx and Engels, for whom unions were both an elementary organisational expression of workers’ resistance to capital and a potential means for broader class consciousness to emerge. He then considers Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902), with its argument concerning the limitations of spontaneous trade union consciousness, before turning to Antonio Gramsci and his discussion of trade unionism and the factory councils.

Kelly’s sympathies lean heavily toward Rosa Luxemburg. In The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), Luxemburg examined how mass struggles affect the working class’s political consciousness and organisation. Kelly draws on historical evidence from strike movements to argue that participation in industrial struggle can transform workers’ consciousness. This argument is central to his response to those who, during the 1980s, increasingly depicted the working class as fragmented, politically quiescent, and incapable of collective action. Verso’s account of the book similarly stresses Kelly’s use of empirical evidence to support Luxemburg’s emphasis on the transformative consequences of participation in trade union struggles.

From this foundation, Kelly conducts a two-front polemic. Against the Eurocommunist and “new realist” currents associated with Marxism Today, which drew ever more pessimistic conclusions about the working class’s historical prospects, Kelly argues that the difficulties confronting trade unions in the 1980s were neither historically unprecedented nor evidence that collective working-class organisation had reached its end. His criticism of this standpoint remains one of the book’s strongest elements. The labour movement was experiencing a serious defeat. Still, defeat is not the same thing as the disappearance of the working class or the abolition of the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

On the other flank, however, Kelly challenges conceptions of the trade union bureaucracy, particularly those associated with tendencies to his left. He opposes the claim that full-time trade union officials constitute a distinctive conservative bureaucracy that systematically seeks to contain the struggles of the workers they nominally represent. Drawing on empirical studies, Kelly argues that officials may, under certain circumstances, be as militant as, or even more militant than, sections of their membership. The weakness here lies less in his evidence than in the political conclusion he draws from it. Comparing degrees of individual militancy cannot settle the Marxist critique of trade union bureaucracy. It concerns the apparatus’s objective social position and political function within capitalist society.

Kelly’s strategic conclusions follow from this approach. He examines corporatist arrangements between governments, employers and union organisations and considers the possibilities for a more class-conscious trade union movement capable of placing political pressure upon the state. His ultimate perspective nevertheless remains centred upon militant trade unionism combined with a Labour Party committed to radical economic reform. The democratic road to socialism comes with qualifications, but it remains recognisably within the political traditions of the British Labour left.

The missing question: the unions’ programme

Kelly’s book is strongest when it challenges the new realists’ pessimism. Workers had not lost their capacity for collective struggle. The miners demonstrated this with extraordinary force in 1984-85, sustaining a year-long confrontation with a government that mobilised the capitalist state’s resources against them. The strike therefore never raised a deficiency of courage or militancy among miners. It was the political isolation of their struggle.

The miners’ defeat poses a problem that Kelly’s theoretical framework struggles to answer. A trade union bureaucracy cannot be adequately defined through the subjective qualities of individual officials. A bureaucrat can speak militantly, support particular strikes, and occasionally find himself pushed into conflict with employers, yet he remains fundamentally distinct from the membership in social and political terms. The decisive issue is how the trade union apparatus relates to capitalist property relations, the national state, and the political organisations that defend the existing social order.

Trotsky’s unfinished 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” matters precisely here. Trotsky sought to link the development of monopoly capitalism to the tendency toward closer integration of the trade union apparatus with the capitalist state. He did not conclude from the bureaucracy’s conservatism that revolutionaries should abandon workers organised in trade unions. Rather, he saw the revolutionary party’s political independence from the apparatus as essential precisely because large sections of the working class remained organised within the unions.

Kelly’s presentation of Lenin and Luxemburg tends to blur this issue by presenting their differences too strongly through the categories of pessimism and optimism towards spontaneous industrial struggle. Lenin argued that workers were not incapable of militant struggle, nor that economic struggles could never contribute to political radicalisation. The essential point was that spontaneous struggle alone does not resolve the problem of socialist political consciousness and revolutionary leadership. The working class encounters not merely the employers but an entire network of political institutions and ideological pressures through which bourgeois society reproduces itself.

This distinction becomes decisive when Kelly moves from empirical evidence to strategic conclusions. His alternative to the demoralisation of the new realists is ultimately not to build an independent revolutionary leadership but to make the established relationship between the unions and the Labour Party more militant. This is the central limitation of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Kelly correctly insists that the working class retains an enormous capacity for struggle. Still, he does not adequately confront the possibility that the existing organisations claiming to represent that class had themselves become increasingly important mechanisms for subordinating workers’ struggles to the requirements of British capitalism.

The verdict of history

In the decades after Kelly’s book was published, this question gained an importance that 1988 could only partly have anticipated. The globalisation of capitalist production placed immense pressure upon nationally based trade union programmes. Corporations increasingly organised production across borders, while unions remained institutionally and politically tied to the national state. The old reformist perspective, which held that union pressure on national employers and Labour governments could produce an indefinite succession of improvements, became increasingly untenable.

Kelly’s own later scholarship continued to engage extensively with these problems. Rethinking Industrial Relations developed a mobilisation approach to industrial relations and collective action, and Kelly later revisited that work in a 2018 article examining conceptual and empirical questions that had arisen since its publication. His later research also examined union revitalisation, organising strategies, social partnership, and strike activity. His academic profile identifies industrial conflict, trade unions, and union organising as subjects associated with this work.

This later development matters because mobilisation theory addresses a key problem: how grievances acquire a collective character and become organised action. Yet, from a Marxist standpoint, it does not, by itself, resolve the more fundamental political question posed by Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. Explaining why workers mobilise is not the same as explaining the political role of the organisations through which they mobilise, nor does it determine which political programme their struggles should pursue.

The British strike wave of 2022-23 demonstrated the enduring relevance of this distinction. Rail workers, postal workers, nurses, doctors, teachers and other sections of the working class entered into major struggles over wages and conditions. The eruption of these conflicts vindicated a key aspect of Kelly’s polemic against those who had written off collective working-class struggle during the 1980s. But industrial militancy did not automatically resolve the question of political strategy and leadership. Lenin’s central problem, identified more than a century earlier, remained: what political perspective should guide the struggles generated by the objective antagonism between workers and capital?

Consequently, the historical fate of Kelly’s argument is ironic. Against the “new realists”, he was right to insist that the working class had not disappeared and that trade unions still had the capacity for collective action. But the labour movement’s subsequent history showed that these observations alone were insufficient. The more fundamental question was whether organisations rooted in national reformism could provide a progressive way forward under conditions of globally integrated capitalist production.

From Trade Unions and Socialist Politics to mobilisation theory

Kelly’s subsequent intellectual development makes Trade Unions and Socialist Politics particularly interesting in retrospect. His later Rethinking Industrial Relations shifted the analytical emphasis towards mobilisation, collectivism and the processes through which workers become involved in collective action. Kelly returned to that work in “Rethinking Industrial Relations revisited”, describing the later article as an examination of the origins and consequences of the earlier book and of conceptual and empirical questions raised subsequently.

His wider work on union revitalisation likewise examined the organisational possibilities confronting unions in a changing economic environment. Union Organisation and Activity, edited with Paul Willman, addressed union organising, statutory recognition, public-sector union strategies, partnership agreements, and the barriers existing union structures may pose to revitalisation. This provides an important bridge between the 1988 arguments and Kelly’s subsequent industrial-relations scholarship.

Yet continuity matters as much as development. Whether the analytical language is socialist politics, mobilisation, organising or revitalisation, the decisive unresolved issue concerns the political character of trade unionism itself. Unions cannot be understood solely as mechanisms through which grievances become collective action. Their leadership pursues definite programmes, operates within definite institutional relationships, and responds to pressures generated by its position between labour, employers, and the capitalist state.

This is ultimately why Kelly’s examination of the classical Marxist controversy cannot be resolved by industrial-relations sociology alone. The question is political. Under conditions of globally integrated production. At the same time, the trade unions remain nationally organised, can the existing apparatus become the vehicle for an international socialist struggle against capital, or does its programme bind workers ever more closely to national economic competitiveness and the capitalist state?

Conclusion

Trade Unions and Socialist Politics deserves to be read. Kelly’s critique of pessimistic currents that declared the working class historically exhausted contained an important element of truth, and his insistence on the transformative potential of collective struggle stood in sharp contrast to the increasingly fashionable abandonment of class politics during the 1980s. The empirical seriousness of his work distinguishes it from much of the superficial theorising produced during that period.

But the book’s greatest significance today lies in the contradiction at its centre. Kelly correctly defended the working class’s continued capacity for collective struggle but underestimated the political problem posed by the organisations that mediated those struggles. Workers’ defeats cannot be explained simply by insufficient mobilisation, unfavourable economic conditions, or variations in membership militancy. They raise questions of organisation, programme and political leadership.

Read nearly four decades after its publication, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics poses a problem more clearly than it solves. The issue is not whether the working class can fight. Repeated eruptions of class struggle have answered that question. The fundamental question is whether workers can advance through organisations whose political perspective remains subordinate to national reformism and the capitalist state.

The alternative is not political passivity or withdrawal from workers already organised within trade unions. It is the struggle for the working class’s political independence from the bureaucracy, combined with the development of democratic organisations through which workers can exercise direct control over their struggles and link them internationally. From this standpoint, rank-and-file committees are not simply a militant supplement to the existing apparatus but an organisational expression of a fundamentally different political orientation, based on the international unity and political independence of the working class.

That is the central question Trade Unions and Socialist Politics raised in 1988 but could not resolve. The intervening decades have made its resolution more urgent, not less.

Bibliography

Primary text

Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.

Classical Marxist sources

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920. Edited by Quintin Hoare. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Lenin, V. I. What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902). In Collected Works, vol. 5. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). London: Bookmarks, 1986.

Marx, Karl. “Trade Unions: Their Past, Present and Future.” Resolution of the International Working Men’s Association, Geneva Congress, 1866.

Trotsky, Leon. “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (1940). In Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969.

Kelly’s later work on trade unions and industrial relations

Kelly, John. Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge, 1998. Kelly subsequently revisited the arguments of this book in 2018. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly. “Union Revitalisation Strategies in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Industrial Relations 9, no. 1 (2003): 7–24. [scholar.google.com]

Frege, Carola M., and John Kelly, eds. Varieties of Unionism: Strategies for Union Revitalisation in a Globalising Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [scholar.google.com]

Kelly, John, and Paul Willman, eds. Union Organisation and Activity. London: Routledge, 2004. The volume examines organising, recognition, partnership, public-sector unionism and union revitalisation. [routledge.com]

Kelly, John. Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform. London: Routledge, 2010. John Kelly’s ORCID record lists the work among his publications. [orcid.org]

Kelly, John. “Rethinking Industrial Relations Revisited.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 39, no. 4 (2018): 701–709. [eprints.bbk.ac.uk]

Related works

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.

Hyman, Richard. Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism. London: Pluto Press, 1971.

Kelly, John. Labour and the Unions. London: Verso, 1987.

North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.

Contemporary reviews

Grimshaw, Bruce J. Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. Hummer, no. 24.

Review of Trade Unions and Socialist Politics, by John Kelly. American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (December 1989).