Harvey J. Kaye’s The British Marxist Historians, published in 1984, 1995, and 2021, remains the definitive scholarly overview of the CPHG tradition. It covers figures like Raphael Samuel, Maurice Dobb, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and, to some extent, George Rudé and others. This work is a thorough and rigorous piece of intellectual history that deserves recognition for its quality. Nevertheless, it also exhibits certain blind spots tied to its political stance, and a Marxist critique should honestly acknowledge both its strengths and limitations.

A careful reader would first want to know what Kaye Gets Right. His true contribution is to show the coherence of the British Marxist historians as a group: they not only shared an organisation, the CPHG, established in 1946, but also a common set of intellectual issues, methodological stances, and political motivations. These elements led to a distinctive and impactful body of historical scholarship. Kaye rightly highlights their collective challenge to bourgeois historiography, especially the Whig tradition, which assumed class conflict was incidental rather than fundamental to British social history, as a significant intellectual achievement.

Kaye clearly emphasizes their core methodological perspective: a materialist approach to history that focuses on class relations and economic structures. However, what sets them apart from simple economic determinism is their emphasis on the agency of historical actors, acknowledging that workers and peasants are active participants in history rather than merely passive recipients of structural forces. E.P. Thompson’s remark in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class that class is not just a structure or category but something that happens exemplifies this attempt to integrate structure and agency. Kaye correctly identifies this as the central theme guiding much of the group’s most impactful work.

His treatment of Rodney Hilton’s work on medieval peasantry is especially insightful, showing how Hilton used a rigorous Marxist framework to analyse feudal class structures and peasant uprisings in English medieval history. This approach engages productively with continental debates over the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The discussion about that transition, involving Dobb versus Sweezy, along with subsequent contributions by Hilton, Hill, and others, stands as one of the most important intellectual exchanges in 20th-century Marxist historiography. Kaye presents this debate clearly and fairly.

However, this is the point where Kaye’s account falls short. Despite his sympathy and scholarly effort, Kaye fails to fully address the key political context that influenced the tradition: the Communist Party Historians Group was created, educated, and ideologically limited by British Stalinism and the Comintern’s Popular Front policies. This is not just a minor detail; it is the crucial political backdrop that accounts for both their accomplishments and the inherent structural constraints of their work.

Kaye recognises that these historians were members of the Communist Party and views 1956 as a pivotal moment. However, he considers Stalinism mainly as a political atmosphere that influenced their work, which they partly escaped through their scholarship, rather than as a coherent political agenda that left identifiable distortions in their historical narratives. Ann Talbot offers a more pointed critique of Christopher Hill: she notes that the CPHG historians developed their approach within what she correctly calls “People’s History,” a nationalist historiography that “obscured the class nature of earlier rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.” This, as Talbot argues, directly reflected “the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism, and their efforts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis powers.”

This Popular Front framework, promoting socialism within a single nation and prioritising cross-class national alliances over the working class’s internationalism, was intentionally designed rather than accidental. Launched by the Comintern in 1935, it was a strategic approach grounded in a nationalist ‘people’s history,’ exemplified by the CPHG. By framing the history of the English Revolution as a uniquely English revolutionary tradition connecting ‘freeborn Englishmen’ from Winstanley to the Chartists and the Labour movement, it aimed to legitimise Popular Front politics. This approach sought to cultivate a sense of a progressive national tradition capable of uniting different classes toward shared democratic goals.

When evaluated against that standard, British Marxist historians form a significant yet highly compromised tradition. The political context of Popular Front nationalism often limited their ability to make authentic scholarly contributions. They tended to avoid the crucial political issues of the twentieth century, such as the Moscow Trials, the nature of Stalinism, and the Fourth International—particularly at times when these questions were unavoidable. After 1956, their shift toward empiricism, culturalism, and postmodern pluralism reflected an ongoing theoretical and political deadlock. This impasse stemmed from breaking away from capitalism’s subordination but never developing a revolutionary program capable of transcending it.

Kaye surprisingly does not dedicate a full chapter to A.L. Morton in his book, despite Morton being the founder of the CPHG (1903–1987), author of A People’s History of England (1938), and a key figure in establishing the Communist Party Historians Group. This group, formed in Britain in the late 1940s, included notable scholars like Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobb, and Dona Torr, and produced some of the most influential historical works of the twentieth century. However, a fair assessment of their legacy must acknowledge the contradiction that these historians operated within and under Stalinist political regimes.

Recognising this tradition’s achievements is vital. Challenging the dominant “Whig interpretation of history,” which sees Britain as a land of peaceful, gradual progress and organic class harmony, Communist Party historians emphasised that British history was primarily shaped by class struggle and genuine revolutions. This marked a major advancement in historical scholarship. Christopher Hill identified the mid-seventeenth-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution, not merely a constitutional misunderstanding. Likewise, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class gave voice to ordinary workers, saving them from condescension and obscurity. These contributions are valuable and continue to deserve recognition.

Ann Talbot explains the Communist Party attracted “minds of the very highest intellectual calibre’ because the traditional institutions of church and state had lost their grip on young intellectuals’ imagination. At the same time, “the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.” These individuals were not foolish or mere careerists; they were talented people drawn to Marxism during a period of profound social crisis. They found at the party a link to the influential intellectual legacy of Marx and Engels, even if it was somewhat distorted.

However, a rigorous analysis must avoid evasion. Morton’s People’s History of England exemplifies the political distortion that Stalinism brought into this historical tradition. As Talbot directly states: “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History,’ exemplified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England, where the class nature of past rebels, revolutionaries, and popular leaders was concealed by viewing them all as part of a national revolutionary tradition.”

This nationalist framing was driven by more than just an intellectual stance. It reflected the historiography of Popular Front politics, the Stalinist approach of the 1930s and 1940s, which placed the working class under the influence of seemingly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie under the guise of anti-fascism. By creating a continuous, fundamentally national tradition of popular resistance—stretching from Wat Tyler and John Ball to the Levellers and Chartism—Morton and the Group provided a usable historical mythos for a politics that had already forsaken internationalism and the independent mobilisation of workers. The Popular Front needed a history that enabled the “people” to unite across class divisions against a shared national foe; Morton’s history fulfilled this need.

This critique extends beyond superficial comments to address fundamental methodological issues. The tendency to blur class distinctions, prioritise national over global concerns, and trivialise past revolutionary efforts as a vague “people’s legacy’ all originate from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s opposition to Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution and international worker solidarity. In this context, ‘people’s history’ serves as the historical analogue to the Moscow Trials, providing a supposed “democratic’ facade for the systematic betrayal and execution of genuine revolutionaries. Talbot insightfully characterises the group’s approach to Marxism as ‘Jesuitical,’ highlighting their ability to compartmentalise—embracing a scientific Marxist perspective while being limited by Stalinist constraints, akin to Jesuit scientists operating within the boundaries set by the Church, but not beyond.

A key aspect often overlooked in the book is Dona Torr’s significance. She truly deserves to be rescued from historical neglect. Dona Torr (1883–1956) occupies a unique and sometimes defining role within the Communist Party Historians Group. Unlike more prolific writers such as Hill or Thompson, she is regarded as the intellectual maternal figure of the tradition—someone who profoundly shaped its viewpoints, methods, and political stance. Acknowledging her contributions is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the Group’s achievements and the notable limitations they faced.

Torr belonged to an earlier generation than the younger historians she mentored. Born in 1883, she was shaped by the pre-war socialist movement and became a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. A dedicated scholar with excellent language skills, she spent many years as a translator and editor at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. There, she produced English editions of Marx and Engels’s selected correspondence and other texts, thereby forging a direct institutional link to the Stalinist leadership. Her role was not that of a peripheral ally but of someone whose academic work was closely integrated into the bureaucracy’s effort to shape and control the Marxist canon.

Her most notable historical contribution was *Tom Mann and His Times* (Volume 1, 1956), a biography of the famous syndicalist and labour organiser published shortly before her death. Only one volume was completed, which is somewhat symbolic of its unfinished nature. Nevertheless, her influence on the Historians Group was more prominent through her role as a teacher, mentor, and political guide to emerging scholars than through her publications.

Ann Talbot’s analysis of Christopher Hill explicitly highlights Torr, along with Maurice Dobb, as the key figure who transmitted the Stalinist political perspective to the Group. Hill, Thompson, Hilton, and Hobsbawm all “came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.”

This framing is both precise and significant. Torr was not merely an experienced scholar sharing craft knowledge; she served as the conduit through which a politically skewed interpretation of Marxist historiography was passed on to the next generation.

What did this specifically mean? The main distortion was the subordination of internationalist class analysis to a nationalist “people’s history” framework. Torr’s intellectual background, shaped by her years in the Stalinist cultural sector and her involvement in Popular Front politics, inclined her to adopt this framework rather than a true Marxist approach.

The “people’s history” perspective, evident in Morton’s book and throughout the Group, obscures the class nature of historical figures by positioning them within a continuous national tradition of popular struggle. Even the Tom Mann biography illustrates this bias: Mann was a true working-class leader of international significance, but focusing solely on his story within the British radical tradition overlooks the internationalist elements of his politics and his ties to the syndicalist movement.

Hobsbawm: The Most Revealing Case

Kaye shows great respect for Hobsbawm and considering the vastness and productivity of his scholarly work, that respect is well justified. However, Hobsbawm was more than just a historian who was a member of the Communist Party. His Stalinism was not just an incidental aspect of his life; it fundamentally shaped his political conclusions.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was the most internationally recognised member of the Communist Party Historians Group and, from a Marxist viewpoint, its most influential and politically insightful figure. His lengthy career, numerous publications, sustained membership in the Communist Party until 1991, and later role in guiding the British Labour Party’s ideological transition toward Blairism make him more than just a prominent nineteenth-century historian. Hobsbawm exemplifies the strong connections between Stalinist politics, historical distortion, and the ongoing suppression of revolutionary consciousness within the working class.

An honest evaluation of Hobsbawm starts with his dealings with the Socialist Labour League and Gerry Healy. The clash between the SLL and Hobsbawm was a key political debate in the postwar history of the British left, with stakes that turned on whether the working class would rise from the 1956 Stalinist crisis with a revolutionary Marxist leadership, or whether that energy would be reintegrated into the existing bourgeois political system. Hobsbawm and Healy clearly exemplify the two main opposing sides of this debate.

The Hungarian Revolution of October 1956 and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU earlier that year created the most significant crisis British Stalinism had ever encountered. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian workers’ uprising—organised around authentic workers’ councils reminiscent of the October 1917 soviets—thousands of CPGB members faced political upheaval. Among them were leading figures from the Communist Party Historians Group. The pressing questions raised by 1956 were: What is the meaning of Stalinism? Where did it originate? And what should be the future course?

The response to these questions was not merely academic; it determined whether one aimed to rebuild the revolutionary movement on true Marxist principles or drifted into liberal, nationalist, or reformist politics cloaked in terms like “humanism” and “democratic socialism.” As detailed in the document “The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain),” Gerry Healy’s faction, “The Club,” which operated within the Labour Party, was uniquely equipped for this moment.

It was the only political group in Britain capable of explaining why Stalinism evolved as it did, because it was the sole tendency that defended Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet state’s degeneration against both Stalinists and Pabloite revisionists within the Fourth International. Healy himself had been expelled from the CPGB in 1937 for questioning the Moscow Trials and spent the subsequent two decades developing a small but theoretically grounded Trotskyist cadre, fighting on two fronts: against the Stalinist bureaucracy and against the Pabloite tendency within the Fourth International that sought to liquidate independent Trotskyist organisations into the mass Stalinist parties.

In 1956, Healy and The Club acted with remarkable energy. They issued pamphlets, distributed copies of Trotsky’s “The Revolution Betrayed,” and Healy personally travelled across the country, meeting dissident CPGB members and urging them to seek a full account of Stalin’s crimes and to study the true history of the Soviet Union. When Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent whose reports from Hungary had been censored and suppressed by the party, distanced himself from the CPGB, Healy arranged for the publication of his “Hungarian Tragedy” as a widely circulated pamphlet. During the special CPGB congress in April 1957, The Club published a daily bulletin. The Labour Review was reintroduced in January 1957 to foster deeper discussion on the Stalinist crisis and the future of socialism. According to the SEP’s Historical Foundations, Healy’s group was “the only tendency to make any gains from the crisis in British Stalinism.”

The clash between the Trotskyist movement and dissident CP intellectuals, including members of the Historians Group, crystallised during the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, organised by the Socialist Forum. This significant event united a wide range of the British left to debate the implications of 1956 and future directions. David North’s political biography of Cliff Slaughter offers an in-depth account of the proceedings and their revelations.

Barbara Slaughter, who was present with Cliff Slaughter, remembered Healy’s speech: “Healy stated that ‘This is the moment to read books. It’s the time to uncover the true history of the Russian Revolution.’ There was no theatrics; he was very composed and self-assured… It seemed he had been waiting for a situation like this for decades.” The Newsletter quoted him as saying: “This is the season for reading books, not burning them. Let’s avoid pre-labelling. Let’s discard demagogy. Don’t elevate anyone to a ‘pedestal.’ Read and explore all perspectives.”

The reaction from the CP Historians Group environment was revealing. John Saville, a leading member of the Historians Group and a close associate of E.P. Thompson, advocated for an essentially nationalist response to the crisis. He argued it was essential to “stop talking hot air and develop a body of Marxist ideas that genuinely resonate with the British working class. This required studying our own workers’ movement and its history, about which there was far too little knowledge.” The SLL’s Newsletter responded sharply: “the real issue facing the socialist movement in 1957 was not a lack of knowledge about events in Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, but what had occurred within the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”

This exchange highlights the core political divide. The CP Historians Group tradition—represented by Saville’s ideas and, in different contexts, in Thompson’s *New Reasoner* and eventually the *New Left Review*—aimed to address the crisis of Stalinism by focusing on specifically British working-class traditions. This approach intentionally disconnected contemporary socialist politics from the broader revolutionary heritage of Bolshevism and the Left Opposition. E.P. Thompson, who collaborated with Saville in the *New Reasoner*, went further, writing in the *Newsletter* that “positions and attitudes which are labelled ‘Trotskyist’ tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” As North notes, he remained “a bitter opponent of Trotskyism.”

Hobsbawm’s Position at the Crossroads

Where did Hobsbawm position himself in this context? Unlike Thompson, Hill, and Saville, Hobsbawm did not resign from the Communist Party after the Hungarian repression. He remained—not due to naïve loyalty to socialist ideals, but because, as Ann Talbot’s analysis of his autobiography highlights, he held a deep, considered political belief in the Stalinist structure as a social-order tool rather than an agent of revolution. His admission—that he had “the instincts of a Tory communist “and his joy at Militant’s later expulsion from the Labour Party are not anomalies but consistent signs of a coherent political identity formed during the Popular Front era and never relinquished.

This means that Hobsbawm occupied a position even further removed from the SLL than the Thompson-Saville milieu. While Thompson and the New Left at least formally broke with the CPGB and attempted to construct a “humanist” Marxism outside it, however inadequate and anti-Trotskyist that project remained, Hobsbawm remained openly inside the party. His political function, as both Talbot and North demonstrate, was to provide the Stalinist apparatus with a scholarly and prestigious intellectual face precisely at the moment when it was most vulnerable to the challenge from the Trotskyist left.

The SLL’s Labour Review identified this tendency with precision. The relaunched journal described what kind of Marxist movement it intended to build: “Not a coterie of well-meaning university Dons and writers who have something to say on every subject except the class struggle taking place under their noses; not a party paying lip-service to Marxism but in fact dominated by whichever faction happens to be in control in Moscow.” This formulation — the “university Dons and writers” who could say everything except what mattered about the class struggle is a direct political characterization of the Historians Group milieu, including Hobsbawm.

Cliff Slaughter, himself a former CP member who had joined the Trotskyist movement precisely through the Wortley Hall confrontation, became the SLL’s primary theoretical voice in this polemic. His essay “The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class,” published in Labour Review, identified the core problem of the emerging New Left with clarity: their “effort to direct Marxism away from its concentration on the class struggle as the driving force of history.” He wrote: “It is around the concept of class that the drift from Marxism is concentrated, despite the lip-service paid to Marxism. There is not a scrap of Marxism in any approach to class which does not have class conflict at its core.”

This was a direct theoretical challenge to the historiographical tradition of which Hobsbawm was the most prominent representative. E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class — which would appear in 1963 — was already being gestured at in the New Reasoner discussions: the idea that working-class consciousness was formed primarily through cultural and national experience, through the “peculiarities of the English,” rather than through the international dynamics of the class struggle. Slaughter recognised this for what it was: not an enrichment of Marxism but its dissolution into a form of left nationalism, leaving the working class politically disarmed.

The second most important critique of the politics of Hobsbawm came from David North’s landmark essay “Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the Twentieth Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm” North begins his reply saying, “In the course of his long professional career as a historian, he has written many valuable scholarly works. The volumes he devoted to the French Revolution and the development of capitalism in the nineteenth century were thoughtful and sensitive studies.” Hobsbawm’s great “Age of…” tetralogy — The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994)  brought a genuinely sweeping Marxist-influenced analysis of modern world history to a mass readership. His work on banditry, pre-industrial popular protest, the invention of tradition, and nationalism contained real scholarly insights. For whole generations of students, his books provided an entry point into serious historical thinking about capitalism, class, and social transformation.”

These accomplishments merit recognition. However, as North’s direct response to Hobsbawm clarifies, they cannot be separated from or used to justify the deep and ultimately politically harmful distortions of his ideas and public role. Hobsbawm himself admitted that, as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, he intentionally avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the twentieth century because “the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful.” As David North directly states in his reply: “Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have forced him to tell lies is a question he has never convincingly answered.”

This confession is more damning than any external criticism. It is Hobsbawm who wrote brilliantly about the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, the formation of the labour movement, and the age of capital, and who then, when it came to the central historical questions of his own lifetime, imposed a Stalinist political censorship on his own mind. The same pattern identified by Ann Talbot in the Group as a whole, the “Jesuitical partition” of the intellect, the pursuit of historical science up to the precise point where the bureaucracy drew its line, is openly acknowledged by its most eminent member.

What this means concretely is that in a historian who lived through the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the collapse of the USSR, the most important half of the historical record was either falsified or suppressed in the service of Stalinist politics. And when Hobsbawm finally did write about the twentieth century at length, in The Age of Extremes and in his essay collection On History, the result was precisely what David North’s reply demolishes in forensic detail.

North identifies this as a form of “ultra-deterministic, super-objectivist and fatalistic” historical method that is entirely alien to genuine Marxism. The exposure is incisive. Hobsbawm’s argument runs as follows: the Russian Revolution was, like a natural catastrophe, essentially “uncontrollable”; Lenin’s aims and intentions were “irrelevant” to what the revolution ultimately became; the USSR’s future course was “more or less prescribed” by 1921; and therefore “the rest is speculation.” The Left Opposition, Trotsky’s analysis, the political struggle within the Communist Party during the 1920s — all of this can be set aside. In a 300-page book centrally concerned with the place of the October Revolution in twentieth-century history, Trotsky’s name appears precisely once.

North’s reply is devastating on the methodological point. He writes that Hobsbawm’s position amounts to “starting, and ending, with ‘who won.'” But as North explains, historical materialism does not reduce history to a record of accomplished facts. It examines the contradictory and conflicting elements within the historical process — including the alternatives that were defeated. The struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist bureaucracy “happened.” The murder of thousands of genuine Bolsheviks in the Moscow Trials “happened.” Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers’ state “happened.” To exclude these from the historical record because, since Stalin won, there was no point in examining the defeated alternatives is not historical realism — it is apologetics.

The political implication is explicit: if the Stalinist dictatorship was the only plausible outcome of October 1917, then the entire Bolshevik seizure of power becomes historically indefensible. Hobsbawm, North argues, provides “not only an apology for Stalin — ‘objective conditions made him do it’ — but also vindicates the classical liberal bourgeois democratic argument against revolution as an instrument of social change.” By stripping revolutionary parties of any meaningful historical agency, by reducing them to passive vehicles of “uncontrollable” objective forces, Hobsbawm arrives at a historical philosophy that, whatever its intended register, tells the working class: do not attempt to consciously transform society, because history will do with your revolution what it will, and the outcome may be monstrous. This is not Marxism. It is its negation dressed in Marxist language.

Thompson’s Anti-Theoretical Turn

E.P. Thompson presents a different but related problem. Kaye is perceptive about the extraordinary qualities of The Making of the English Working Class — its recovery of artisan radicalism, its insistence on workers as self-making historical agents, its humanist challenge to a certain kind of structuralist Marxism. But Thompson’s later trajectory — culminating in The Poverty of Theory (1978), his polemic against Althusserian structuralism — represents not a deepening of Marxism but a retreat from it. Thompson’s rejection of theory, his empiricist elevation of “historical experience” as the final arbiter against theoretical “models,” was politically connected to his rejection of the revolutionary party and of the ICFI’s insistence on theoretical and political continuity. The attack on Althusser was conducted, whatever Thompson’s intentions, in terms that could equally be used against any systematic Marxist theory, including Trotsky’s. Kaye generally agrees with Thompson’s anti-Althusserian stance and discusses the controversy mainly from Thompson’s perspective. However, the ICFI contends that Thompson’s empiricism—his focus on specific English historical experiences rather than “continental” theoretical ideas—mirrored the nationalist bias evident in post-1956 New Left culture. The “English revolutionary tradition” that Thompson sought to defend ultimately aligned with the British national-state framework rather than a global socialist-revolutionary outlook.

Raphael Samuel and Populism

Raphael Samuel was a somewhat younger figure in this milieu, a student Communist and one of the most energetic organisers of History Workshop, which grew out of the Ruskin College adult education tradition in the 1960s. Samuel became the driving force behind History Workshop Journal (founded in 1976), which sought to democratise historical inquiry, recover the histories of ordinary workers, women, and people with low incomes, and challenge the elitism of academic historiography. His posthumous Theatres of Memory (1994–1998) is his most ambitious intellectual legacy.

Kaye’s account largely ends before Samuel’s most characteristic later work, but the trajectory is instructive. As we discussed previously, Samuel moved from the serious history-from-below of his early research toward an increasingly postmodern celebration of “popular memory,” “theatres of memory,” and the democratic plurality of historical consciousness. Theatres of Memory (1994) represents a Samuel who has essentially dissolved the Marxist analytical framework into a cultural-democratic pluralism that could coexist — as it in fact did — with a sympathetic account of British heritage culture. The class analysis that gave History Workshop Journal its initial power became increasingly optional, then marginal, then absent.

This trajectory from Marxist historiography through cultural studies to postmodern pluralism reflects a deliberate shift tied to a specific political movement. After breaking away from Stalinism in 1956 without adopting Trotskyism, this movement lacked a clear theory of the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategy. Without these core ideas, the focus on history-from-below naturally evolved into a popular academic trend—populism—that valorised ordinary people’s experiences while leaving the exploitative capitalist system unchallenged in analysis.

Raphael Samuel warrants special attention because his career exemplifies both the authentic energies and the significant political boundaries of the CPHG environment. His initial focus on recovering the history of artisans and the working class — including coal miners from Headington Quarry, navvies, and workshop artisans — represented earnest history from below. Additionally, his vigorous efforts to establish the History Workshop as a truly participatory organisation were impressive.

Samuel gradually shifted from Marxist political economy to celebrating popular culture, memory, and “unofficial knowledge,” ultimately merging class analysis into a form of general populism. ‘Theatres of Memory,’ which focuses on heritage, nostalgia, and the use of the past in modern British culture, exemplifies this development at its most advanced and problematic stage. While the analysis of popular memory and heritage is engaging, it lacks a theoretical framework for the state, imperialism, or revolutionary strategies. This approach aligns more with cultural studies than Marxism. Additionally, Samuel’s later work shows a nostalgic attempt to rehabilitate his own Communist past—not by embracing Trotskyism or confronting Stalinism, but by recalling a sense of working-class culture and solidarity.

Maurice Dobb and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism

The debate over the shift from feudalism to capitalism, centred on Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) and Paul Sweezy’s critical reply in Science & Society  (1950), is among the most important theoretical disputes in twentieth-century Marxist history. It tackles the key questions of how and why capitalism arose — issues that are not just historical but essential for understanding social change, class struggle, and the essence of capitalism. To analyse this thoroughly, one must place it within the larger political and intellectual framework from which it originated.

Maurice Dobb (1900–1976), a Cambridge economist and longtime Communist Party member, was a key figure in shaping the CP Historians Group’s theoretical foundations, alongside Dona Torr. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was an ambitious effort to trace, from a Marxist perspective, the extensive historical process by which European feudalism gave way to capitalism. While it remains a significant work despite some flaws, it demonstrates a serious engagement with Marx’s political economy and the specific social changes involved.

Dobb argued that capitalism primarily arose from the internal contradictions and class conflicts within feudalism, rather than from trade expansion and merchant capitalism as earlier theories proposed. He highlighted that the key cause was the crisis of feudal production relations. Under feudalism, surplus extraction from peasants depended on economic coercion—lords wielded their monopoly on violence and legal authority to impose rent, services, and dues. This system was inefficient and prone to crises as lords increased exploitation to maintain revenue amid demographic and economic challenges, and peasant resistance grew, eventually rendering the system unsustainable. The decline of serfdom, especially in Western Europe, then opened the path for a new mode of production based on wage labour.

According to Dobb, the key social change was the rise of a class of petty commodity producers—including artisans, yeomen farmers, and small manufacturers—who broke free from feudal dependence and eventually formed the foundation of a capitalist class. Capitalism emerged from within the feudal economy, gradually evolving as small producers expanded and combined to become wage-earner employers. This explanation is primarily endogenous, meaning capitalism developed from the internal dynamics of feudal class relations rather than from external influences such as trade or commerce.

Sweezy’s Challenge: The Role of Trade and Merchant Capital

Paul Sweezy’s 1950 response in Science & Society, subsequently collected in the symposium volume The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1954) alongside replies by Dobb and contributions from Rodney Hilton, Kohachiro Takahashi, Christopher Hill, and others, mounted a challenge that exposed real tensions within Dobb’s framework while ultimately pointing in a less satisfactory theoretical direction.

Sweezy contended that Dobb’s endogenous explanation underestimated the extent to which external influences shaped the decline of feudalism. He referenced Henri Pirenne’s argument that the resurgence of long-distance trade from the eleventh century was key in dissolving feudal ties. The rise of a monetary economy, the increase of towns as commercial hubs outside the feudal structure, and the growth of merchant capital all created external pressures that unsettled the feudal order — pulling peasants and lords into market dynamics that gradually weakened serfdom and personal dependence.

According to Sweezy, the period between the end of feudalism and the rise of capitalism featured a unique “pre-capitalist commodity production” phase. This stage was neither fully feudal nor entirely capitalist, but dominated by merchant capital and characterised by market-oriented production without widespread wage labour. He viewed this as a vital transitional period that Dobb’s model had overlooked.

The key point is this: if you trace the origins of capitalism mainly to the growth of trade and merchant capital, you inadvertently shift your focus from labour exploitation in production to circulation and exchange. As Beams demonstrates through his examination of Marx’s critique of Proudhon, Marx clearly argued that modern monopoly and competition emerge from the fundamental forces of capitalist production, rather than from an inherent market logic.

Merchant capital penetrating a feudal economy can weaken and destabilise existing relationships without necessarily leading to capitalism. As Marx explained in *Capital*, “The commercial capital, when it holds a dominant position, is everywhere an obstacle to the real capitalist mode of production.” It may act as a force for exploitation without creating the distinct social relations of capitalism, such as widespread wage labour and the constant pressure to innovate in production methods.

The Wider Debate: Hilton, Takahashi, Hill, and the Brenner Thesis

The Science & Society discussion expanded into a wider international debate, with several members of the CP Historians Group participating. Rodney Hilton, the group’s expert in medieval history, strongly endorsed Dobb’s focus on internal class struggle and peasant resistance as the main forces behind the decline of feudalism. His later research on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and medieval English agrarian society provided detailed historical support for the idea that feudal contradictions arose internally. Hilton emphasised that peasant efforts, such as reducing rents and services, expanding common rights, and gaining personal freedom, were crucial to this process. Serfdom was a decisive historical force in its own right, not a mere symptom of larger structural processes.

Kohachiro Takahashi’s contribution added a comparative perspective, suggesting that Japan’s experience—where merchant capital integrated into a feudal society yet yielded outcomes distinct from those of Western European capitalism—supported Dobb’s argument that the nature of agrarian class relations, rather than trade alone, was the key factor. This comparative approach laid the groundwork for a significant later development in the discussion: Robert Brenner’s research in the 1970s.

Brenner’s intervention, known as the “Brenner Debate,” was sparked by his 1976 article in Past and Present and served both as a development and critique of the Dobb framework. Brenner argued, counter to Sweezy-influenced “commercialisation” explanations and demographic determinist views like those of Michael Postan, that the primary factors influencing different historical trajectories—such as capitalism in England, refeudalisation in Eastern Europe, and ongoing peasant proprietorship in France—were not trade expansion or demographic pressures.

Instead, he focused on the specific nature of agrarian class relations: land ownership, the power dynamics between lords and peasants, and the types of surplus extraction these relations enabled. England’s unique path to agrarian capitalism was shaped by landlord control of land, tenant vulnerability to market forces, and the development of large, consolidated farms using wage labour, the outcomes of medieval class struggles.

Brenner’s work sharpened and extended Dobb’s internalist emphasis while also revealing the implicit political tensions. His insistence on the specificity of class relations countered any mechanistic or teleological reading of the transition — any suggestion that capitalism was simply the “natural” outcome of expanded trade or demographic recovery. But it also raised uncomfortable questions for the CP Historians Group tradition: if capitalism’s origins were so deeply rooted in specific and contingent agrarian class relations, what became of the seamless progressive national narrative — from Peasants’ Revolt to Levellers to Chartism that underpinned the “people’s history” framework?

Any honest evaluation of this debate must consider the political environment in which Dobb operated. Like others in the Group, Dobb was politically shaped by the Communist Party and the Stalinist apparatus. His book, *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, was published in 1946 — the same year the Cold War began to solidify, and the Popular Front alliance during the war was breaking down into open inter-imperialist rivalry. Ann Talbot’s analysis for WSWS of the CP Historians Group highlights the core distortion that Stalinist politics introduced into their historiography: the substitution of an internationalist class analysis with a nationalist “people’s history” approach, and the masking of the class nature of historical struggles behind a persistent national revolutionary narrative.

Dobb’s work faces criticism, though more subtly than Morton’s explicitly nationalist people’s History. His focus on the small producer, the yeoman farmer, the craftsman, and the emerging petty bourgeoisie implies a political stance: it sees the progressive social force not in the revolutionary workforce but in a “middle” layer between the feudal aristocracy and the rising proletariat. This aligns with Popular Front policies, which aimed to forge cross-class alliances around a “progressive” petty bourgeoisie against the “reactionary” landlord class, instead of promoting working-class independence from both.

Rodney Hilton: The Group’s Medieval Specialist

Rodney Hilton (1916–2002) was the leading expert in medieval English history within the Communist Party Historians Group. His work consistently reflected the group’s strong methodological principles while also highlighting the political limitations faced by its members. At the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1946 until retirement, his research focused on medieval agrarian society, peasant movements, and the evolving feudal class struggles—primarily in England.

Hilton’s key publications include A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (1966), Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (1973), The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975), and Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (1985). Throughout his work, Hilton maintained a consistent focus: showing that medieval peasants were not merely passive victims of feudal oppression but active agents in history, whose resistance, organisation, and quest for freedom were central to dismantling the feudal system from within.

The Peasants and the Class Struggle

Hilton’s main contribution was to challenge traditional medieval historiography by emphasising that class struggle is key to understanding medieval society. His analysis of the 1381 English Rising—the Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler and John Ball—showed that medieval peasants possessed a sophisticated political awareness, clear demands, and the ability to act collectively. Ball’s well-known statement — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” — reflected Hilton’s view of a genuinely egalitarian ideology rooted in the material realities of feudal exploitation, rather than merely religious or millenarian ideas.

Hilton and the Transition Debate

Hilton’s contribution to the Dobb-Sweezy debate, through his essay in the Science & Society symposium and his later work, strongly aligned with Dobb’s focus on class struggle as the key factor in overcoming feudalism. While Sweezy emphasised the external influence of merchant capital and trade, Hilton argued that the internal dynamics of the feudal relationship between lords and peasants—such as disputes over rents, labour obligations, and villeinage conditions—were crucial to explaining the collapse of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.

This was more than a methodological choice; it was a solid historical argument. Hilton’s in-depth understanding of the English medieval countryside demonstrated, through empirical evidence, that the decline of feudalism in the 14th and 15th centuries was directly linked to increasing peasant resistance, their capacity to leverage demographic crises to better their conditions, and ultimately the end of serfdom. This was driven not by a broad expansion of trade but by the particular balance of class forces within the English countryside.

Simultaneously, the same limitation we discussed earlier regarding Dobb applies here: Hilton’s analysis mainly focused on the English context, specifically the dynamics of the English manor and village community. The broader international framework — linking English agrarian change to the wider European and global context of primitive accumulation, colonial exploitation, and the Atlantic slave trade — was never fully incorporated into his work. This reflects a common limitation of the entire Group: their adherence to a national perspective, shaped by the Popular Front politics that Dona Torr and Maurice Dobb had passed on to the next generation, which even limited their most thorough scholarship.

1956 and Hilton’s Response

Unlike Thompson and Hill, Hilton remained in the Communist Party after 1956. This is a significant biographical fact. His response to the Hungarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s secret speech was to stay, which, in this crucial respect, placed him closer to Hobsbawm than to Thompson. He did not experience 1956 as a decisive political rupture requiring a reconsideration of the fundamental framework. This is consistent with the character of his historical work: Hilton was among the Group’s most consistently “orthodox” members in his political affiliations, less inclined towards the cultural and humanist departures that characterised Thompson’s trajectory, and thus less subject to the kind of crisis of conscience that forced some of the Group’s intellectuals to confront their relationship to Stalinism more directly.

This is a significant biographical detail. The historian who remained in the party after the Hungarian workers’ uprising was suppressed made a political decision, perhaps not fully conscious or articulated, but real, that maintaining organisational continuity with the Stalinist system takes precedence over the political clarity that honest engagement with those events would demand. In Hilton’s case, this decision did not lead to obvious distortions in his medieval scholarship, which was removed from the immediate political debates of 1956. However, it implied that the political context in which he worked — and which influenced the “people’s history” tradition he helped develop — was never subjected to the critical examination required by a true break from Stalinism.

Kaye’s conclusion highlights the importance of the Group’s legacy—such as “history from below,’ recovering class formation, and emphasising the working class as a historical agent—which remain vital for revitalising the socialist left. He views their work as a tool to counteract both postmodernist doubts about historical agency and Thatcherite claims of ‘the end of socialism.” There is real value in defending historical materialism against postmodern ideas that dissolve class analysis. The same fundamental limitation as the tradition he champions: it. The text is situated within a social-democratic and Popular Front political context. The group’s focus on “history from below” is not aimed at creating an independent revolutionary party for the working class. Instead, it serves as cultural and intellectual backing for left-wing activities within bourgeois democratic institutions — primarily, the Democratic Party in the American setting where Kaye operates. The radical democratic tradition, drawn from Thompson, Hill, and others, is used by Kaye to justify progressive-patriotic politics, similar to Sanders’ approach of “reclaiming the American tradition.” The ICFI sees this as a means of subordinating workers to the ruling class.

The Communist Party Historians Group produced genuine intellectual achievements against the dominant tide of conservative and liberal academic historiography. Their insistence on class, on revolution, on the agency of ordinary people was real and valuable. But their political formation within Stalinism imposed an indelible nationalist distortion on their work, prevented serious engagement with the history of the Fourth International and the fight against the Moscow Trials, and ultimately left them without the theoretical and political resources to develop beyond populism and culturalism when the Stalinist framework itself collapsed.

Kaye’s British Marxist Historians is a valuable survey and remains a useful starting point for anyone studying this tradition. But it cannot provide what a genuinely Marxist assessment requires: an evaluation of the CPHG tradition against the standard of the political continuity of Marxism, not merely its intellectual achievements. That standard is provided by the Fourth International and its history by the fight of the Left Opposition against Stalinist falsification, by the defence of the October Revolution against both Stalinist bureaucratism and bourgeois reaction, and by the sustained theoretical work of the ICFI.

Notes

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

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

The New Left Must Look to the Working Class Gerry Healy Labour Review Oct- Nov 1959

An Unreasonable Reasoner Editorial Labour Review Vol 3 No 2 March April 1958

Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the 20th Century: A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm, by David North, 3 January 1998. 

A People’s History of London by John Rees and Lyndsey German is a revised, updated edition of their 2012 book. It broadens the narrative to cover the 21st century, examining London’s social and economic crises. The book explores key issues such as the Grenfell Tower fire and its systemic implications, the rise of mass popular mobilisation, such as the Palestine solidarity movement, and the ongoing housing crisis, which highlights struggles against aggressive urban developers and corporate landlords.

John Rees is a recognised author, broadcaster, and political advocate. He is part of the editorial team at Counterfire and was a co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition. Lindsey German, a lifelong resident of London, is a socialist writer and activist. She serves as the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and has previously run for Mayor of London.

John Rees and Lindsey German are key figures in Counterfire, a British pseudo-left group that split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 2010. Both have played significant roles in organising the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). They maintain that the coalition isn’t about establishing an authentic anti-war movement but aims to steer anti-war sentiment towards support for the Labour Party and trade union leadership. The STWC “functioned as a mechanism for capturing anti-war sentiment and bringing it under the political tutelage of the trade union bureaucracy and a handful of Labourites.” This is the political environment influencing Rees and German’s historical work, shaping it in fundamental ways.

What the Book Does

A People’s History of London explores centuries of the city’s radical and working-class history, including the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, the Chartists, the Matchgirls’ Strike, and the Suffragettes. It is written in an accessible style and seeks to recover a tradition of popular resistance. In this way, it offers a valuable introduction to events often overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream bourgeois history.

However, the book’s framework mirrors the political constraints and deceptions of its authors. Several key points need to be addressed. The “People’s History” genre has a problematic history. This tradition, exemplified by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, tends to oversimplify class differences among the oppressed, replace materialist analysis with moral outrage, and celebrate struggle as an end in itself. It fails to ask the crucial question: what program and party are necessary to guide the working class to victory? The history of London’s radical movements is essentially a record of betrayed class struggles, and understanding the reasons for these betrayals requires political analysis, not mere romanticisation.

A major critique of Rees and German concerns their failure to confront reformism and the Labour Party honestly. Their political view is strongly aligned with the Labour left, including Corbynism and the STWC’s focus on figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn. This shows they are unable to grasp key lessons from London’s labour history: that the Labour Party was meant to contain the working class within capitalism, that trade union bureaucracies have often suppressed class struggle, and that London workers’ setbacks are mainly due to these betrayals.

The origins of the “People’s History” genre are rooted in a specific political context, rather than emerging from a vacuum. As Ann Talbot’s key essay on Christopher Hill underscores, the influential first book in Britain was A.L. Morton’s A People’s History of England, created by the Communist Party Historians’ Group, which included Hill, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Rodney Hilton.

Talbot highlights the political core of this: “People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of the Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie.” Essentially, the genre was developed to support Stalinist politics, overlaying class distinctions with a nationalist “people” narrative to justify class collaboration, rather than promoting independent working-class politics.

This is not merely background; it forms the core genetic code of the genre, shaping all works that carry the “People’s History” label, including Howard Zinn’s influential *A People’s History of the United States* and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.

Tom Mackaman’s insightful obituary of Howard Zinn, a leading figure in the genre, offers a sharp critique of its limitations. Mackaman references Engels’ view on what he called “old materialist” philosophy: it “could not answer the question of what historical forces drive the motives of individuals and groups in history.” Engels argued that “its conception of history, insofar as it exists at all, is mainly pragmatic; it categorises people in history as noble or ignoble and generally shows that the noble are often defrauded while the ignoble tend to prevail.”

This accurately describes the “People’s History” approach, which is fundamentally moral: the oppressed versus their oppressors, resisters against the controllers, and the people versus the Establishment. While names and dates may vary, the core narrative remains unchanged. It lacks dialectical contradictions, fails to recognise historically progressive class forces, and omits analysis of how material relations of production propel social change through conflict. Instead, it depicts an endless cycle of oppression and resistance without proposing a strategy to resolve or end either.

Mackaman highlights how Zinn’s approach leads to significant historiographical errors. Because Zinn views history through a strict moral binary of villains and victims, he interprets the American Revolution and the Civil War as two of the most objectively progressive events in global history—as essentially elite conspiracies aimed at controlling popular unrest. Abraham Lincoln is reduced to a mere “shrewd political operative,” and Tom Paine is criticised for his association with a wealthy individual. These misrepresentations are based not on evidence but on the moralising framework characteristic of the genre.

Mackaman highlights a critical point: the “People’s History” genre originated from the revisionist academic work of the 1960s and 70s, which coincided with the rise of identity politics on American campuses. This alignment is deliberate. Mackaman notes: “The new studies emerged alongside the development of identity politics and the push for affirmative action on campuses, as US liberalism, trade unions, and the Democratic Party aimed to find a new base for their policies outside the working class.” This genre supported this political agenda by replacing the working class—considered the revolutionary agent of history—with a diverse array of oppressed groups whose resistance could be celebrated without questioning the need to overthrow capitalism revolutionarily.

E.P. Thompson, alongside A.L. Morton and Howard Zinn, is a key figure in the genre of A People’s History. This genre and Thompson’s role in it cannot be separated from his

political roots in the Communist Party Historians Group of postwar Britain. Thompson, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and others, was educated within a tradition influenced by Stalinist politics—particularly the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s and 40s.

As Ann Talbot argued in her appraisal of Christopher Hill, this school of history was not simply a scholarly tendency: “The Communist Party sponsored a form of ‘People’s History’, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries.”

In other words, “people’s history” reflected the historiographical view of Popular Front politics, portraying the working class as subordinate to supposedly progressive bourgeois factions, cloaked in the rhetoric of a unified “national people” fighting oppression. The class struggle was transformed into an inspiring moral narrative, but one that is politically benign: a legacy of “resistance” that avoids advocating for revolution, challenging the need to overthrow the bourgeois state, or calling for revolutionary leadership.

Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is truly a landmark in scholarship. Its goal — to uncover the agency, culture, and deliberate self-formation of the English working class during the late 18th and early 19th centuries — led to outstanding empirical research. Thompson emphasized that the working class was not merely shaped by industrial conditions but actively shaped itself, challenging simple economic determinism. His exploration of artisan radicalism, Methodist dissent, Luddism, and the radical clubs of the 1790s deepened our understanding of how class consciousness emerges.

But the political framework within which Thompson worked imposed severe limitations. Like Hill, Thompson was drawn to identifying a distinctively English revolutionary tradition — one running from the Civil War to the emerging labour movement that was fundamentally national in character. Talbot observes that both Hill and Thompson “had no interest in showing the continental origins of many of the ideas that inspired the English revolution,” nor in tracing the genuinely international development of Enlightenment thought, democratic theory, and working-class politics.

A true Marxist approach to history involves analysing the leadership and goals of working-class movements, whether in London, the US, or elsewhere. Unlike the “People’s History” genre, it must examine the class dynamics driving both victories and defeats, place national struggles in the context of global class conflict and draw lessons for today’s socialist movement. It views the working class not just as victims to be pitied but as the revolutionary force whose consciousness evolves through struggle, and whose liberation depends on building an international revolutionary party.

The political role of the genre today. From a Marxist perspective, the main limitation of this genre is its strategic emptiness. While it can depict struggles, it cannot analyse their failures. It can praise resisters but cannot determine what program or party would have led them to victory. It can list the crimes of the ruling class, yet it cannot explain how these crimes are perpetuated, specifically through the capitalist mode of production and the state structures that sustain it.

Today, the “People’s History” brand mainly serves as a marketing term for pseudo-left ideology. When John Rees and Lindsey German author a “People’s History of London,” they exploit the emotional appeal of centuries of working-class resistance yet deliberately sidestep the political conclusions such history implies. This genre permits them to praise the Chartists, match girls, and dockers without addressing why these movements were ultimately defeated. It also avoids recognizing the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy as the primary agents of class betrayal in the twentieth century or advocating for a revolutionary party with a socialist agenda.

Notes

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1982),

[F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow, 1973),

H.N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution, published posthumously in 1961 and edited by Christopher Hill, stands as one of the most significant radical narratives of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution. It is valuable not only for what it uncovers about one of history’s major revolutionary upheavals, but also for the insights into its political and theoretical boundaries, which shed light on the tradition it originates from.

Henry Noel Brailsford was among the most talented socialist journalists and writers in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. He was linked to the Independent Labour Party, a strand of ethical, Nonconformist socialism that positioned itself to the left of the Labour Party’s main faction but remained politically allied with it. Brailsford wrote extensively on topics like foreign affairs, imperialism, and international politics. His major work on the seventeenth century, The Levellers and the English Revolution, was left incomplete upon his death and was published posthumously in 1961, edited by Christopher Hill.

Brailsford engaged with the Levellers with sincere empathy and thorough scholarship. He restored the coherence and importance of their political agenda, the Agreements of the People, which calls for manhood suffrage, the abolition of tithes and excise, religious toleration, and legal equality, and positioned them as the most advanced democratic movement produced by the English Revolution. His respectful treatment of figures such as John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn as serious political thinkers, rather than merely eccentric sectarians, marked a significant contribution. Brailsford demonstrated that the Levellers were not just agitators but were working to establish a constitutional basis for a democratic republic, an effort with few global precedents at the time.

Hill edited Brailsford’s posthumous volume on the Levellers, creating an apt collaboration as his research complemented and expanded Brailsford’s focus on the radical plebeians of the revolution. A prominent figure in 20th-century Marxist historiography of the English Revolution, Hill’s work was thoroughly reviewed by Ann Talbot of the WSWS, who emphasised its complexities following Hill’s death in 2003. His ideas were influenced by the Marxist Historians Group of the Communist Party, which included renowned scholars such as E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm.

His main contribution was challenging the dominant Whig interpretation of British history, which presents a comforting myth symbolised by the Trevelyan family’s country houses, owned by the National Trust, and suggests that Britain experienced a uniquely peaceful and gradual political development without revolutionary upheaval. Hill contended that the events of the 1640s were a true bourgeois revolution, with one ruling class overthrowing another, driven by the mass population whose awareness was significantly changed. As Talbot points out, “these achievements were considerable at the time and remain relevant today, especially as historians increasingly dismiss any serious economic or social analysis.”

Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1972) examines, more deeply than Brailsford, the radical groups such as the Diggers, Ranters, and early Quakers—highlighting how these marginalised factions advanced social change that the propertied classes leading the revolution could never permit. However, Hill’s perspective was heavily influenced by the Stalinist politics in which he was educated. As Talbot points out, the Communist Party promoted a “People’s History” that maintained a primarily national outlook aligned with the Popular Front, thereby subordinating the working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. This resulted in a key limitation: Hill never placed the English Revolution within its broader international context, nor did he examine how the ideas of English revolutionaries connected to continental Enlightenment thought. He also retained a romantic attachment to specifically English radical traditions. His later interest in radical sects during the Restoration period, long after their revolutionary importance had faded, reflects this nationalism’s desire to portray a continuous English revolutionary tradition rather than explore how revolutionary ideas spread and evolved across national borders.

Hill notably avoided the twentieth century almost completely. As Talbot observes, among the Marxist Historians Group, Hill focused on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth, Hobsbawm on the nineteenth, and Hilton on the Middle Ages, none of whom specialised in their own era. This was intentional. In recent history, Stalinist politics exerted too direct a control; engaging honestly would have led to conflicts with the bureaucracy. Hill’s sole engagement with the twentieth century, a 1947 study of Lenin, is marked by repeated dismissals of Trotsky as a “Westernising theoretician”, a point Talbot rightly criticises as his weakest and most politically dishonest aspect. He could not fully pursue his true Marxist instincts where the bureaucratic line was drawn.

Trotsky’s 1925 work, ‘Where Is Britain Going?’, surprisingly predicted many of Hill’s key insights about the English Revolution. It emphasised two major revolutionary traditions in British history, the revolution of Cromwell and Chartism, which Whig gradualism tends to overlook. Trotsky saw Cromwell as a revolutionary bourgeois leader who suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to go beyond the limits of capitalist property.

Whether Hill independently drew these conclusions from Marx and Engels or was subtly influenced by Trotsky without acknowledgement, his most important historical work aligns with them. The tragedy is that his political background prevented him from realising that the essential lessons of the English Revolution, namely, that the bourgeoisie betrays democratic goals whenever property is at risk and that only the working class can finish the democratic tasks left incomplete by the bourgeois revolution, are highly relevant to the twentieth-century challenges faced by Hill and his generation.

Hill and Brailsford

Although they came from different political backgrounds, both aimed to rekindle the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the seventeenth-century English Revolution, challenging a conservative and complacent mainstream history. Brailsford was driven by an ethical socialist’s moral commitment to the oppressed, while Hill applied the Marxist analysis of class structures. Collectively, their work exemplifies the pinnacle of the British left-wing historical tradition focused on this era.

Their shared limitations are also instructive. Both remained confined within a nationally bounded framework and did not fully explore the global implications of the English Revolution, such as its role in the Atlantic world, its links to the Dutch Republic, or the ideas that would later influence the American and French Revolutions a century afterwards. Moreover, for political rather than purely intellectual reasons, neither could apply the lessons of seventeenth-century revolutionary history to the revolutionary challenges of their own time. Trotskyism, however, broadens this horizon in a way neither the ILP nor the Stalinist tradition allowed.

The Levellers and the English Revolution

Brailsford’s book focuses on the Levellers, a radical democratic group that emerged from the New Model Army and London’s artisan and petty-bourgeois classes during the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Led by John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, the Levellers produced important documents, especially the Agreement of the People, which advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the abolition of monopolies and tithes. Their efforts broadened the scope of the English Revolution towards its most leftist and democratic ideals.

Brailsford’s account is a passionate and richly detailed narrative that takes these men and their ideas seriously as historical actors, not merely background colour to the drama of Cromwell and Parliament. In this sense, the book is a real contribution to understanding the social depth of the revolution. Brailsford’s socialism was rooted in the parliamentary, Fabian, and ethical-socialist traditions of British labourism. He never broke from the framework of reformism, the perspective that capitalism could be gradually transformed from within through parliamentary pressure, trade union organisation, and moral persuasion of the ruling class.

Trotsky’s analysis of the British labour movement, set out in Where Is Britain Going? (1925) was a direct critique of this entire tradition: Trotsky argued that the ILP and the labour bureaucracy were incapable of leading the working class to power precisely because they refused to make the political break with bourgeois institutions.

Brailsford’s approach is limited by the tradition he comes from. As an ethical socialist and ILP liberal, he admired the Levellers mainly for their constitutional and democratic demands, viewing them as early forerunners of liberal democracy rather than fully understanding the class dynamics behind their position. He focused on the moral strength of their arguments rather than on the social forces that enabled or hindered them. While he recognised that Cromwell and the Grandees suppressed the Levellers, he did not fully analyse why the bourgeois revolutionary leadership felt compelled to do so. This gap is not a personal shortcoming but a reflection of the ethical socialist tradition’s tendency to moralise history rather than examine its material basis.

John Rees and the English Revolution

John Rees is arguably the most influential and skilled historian to employ a Marxist historiographical approach to analyse the English bourgeois revolution. His work highlights the strengths of Hill and Brailsford but also points to their political shortcomings. Rees, a longtime member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and co-founder of Counterfire, authored key works such as “The Algebra of Revolution” (1998) and notably “The Leveller Revolution” (2016), which explores themes similar to Brailsford’s. He provides an earnest scholarly view of the English Revolution from a leftist perspective. Nonetheless, from a Marxist/Trotskyist standpoint, both Rees and Counterfire operate as a pseudo-left, projecting a radical front while subordinating working-class political independence to broad front tactics, such as Coalitions like Stop the War, which link workers with bourgeois-liberal and establishment forces. Rees has played a key role in this strategic orientation.

As a result, despite his competent historical scholarship, Rees’s political actions often undermine the very lessons of the English Revolution, such as the idea that the bourgeoisie betrays its revolution when the plebeian masses push beyond property boundaries, and that the working class needs its own independent political leadership. Brailsford deserves better than to be pressed into service as a respectable ancestor for Counterfire’s brand of left reformism. He was a serious socialist grappling with real questions. The tragedy is that the tradition he inhabited, sincere in its individual representatives, was organically incapable of providing the revolutionary leadership the working class required.

The Levellers and the struggle for Socialism Today

The Levellers’ experience offers deep lessons for today’s working class. The key lesson is that, regardless of how radical the democratic demands are during a revolutionary crisis, they cannot be achieved unless the working class or its equivalent seizes political power directly. While the Levellers controlled the army and had street support, they lacked a party and a clear program to challenge the bourgeoisie for state control as a unified class; they merely pressured it. Cromwell understood this dynamic, which allowed him to outmanoeuvre and ultimately dismantle them.

Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, summarised the main lesson from the entire bourgeois revolutionary period: the ideological forms through which class interests manifested such as Puritanism, natural rights theory, and millenarianism were merely the historical guise in which emerging class forces presented themselves The Levellers, by demanding “freeborn rights,” articulated the revolutionary democratic aspirations of the emerging plebeian classes in a language accessible to them.

The Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, went even further, explicitly communalistic in their demands, occupying common land and arguing that true freedom required the abolition of property itself. Brailsford’s book touches on this dimension, though Winstanley is not its central focus. From a Marxist standpoint, the Diggers represent the most historically prescient current of the English Revolution, expressing in embryonic and utopian form the communist impulse that would only find its scientific foundation two centuries later with Marx and Engels. In this respect, readers would do well to examine John Gurney’s work on the diggers and Winstanley.

‘The Levellers and the English Revolution’ is Brailsford’s most significant work historically, showcasing both his strengths and limitations. His strengths are notable: he vividly portrayed the Levellers as historical figures, reconstructed the Putney Debates with remarkable clarity, and took their radical democratic agenda seriously at a time when mainstream historiography overlooked them. On the other hand, his limitations are also evident: his framework was rooted in a liberal-democratic lineage, viewing the Levellers as precursors to parliamentary reform, rather than employing a rigorous Marxist analysis of the class forces that drove and limited the English bourgeois revolution.

The Levellers and the English Revolution is a crucial and accessible book about a highly intense yet often overlooked phase in the history of class struggle. Brailsford’s work should be read alongside Trotsky’s Where Is Britain Going?, Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down* and God’s Englishman, as well as Engels’s analysis of bourgeois revolutions in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It shows that major revolutionary upheavals often produce unforeseen forces, and their success hinges on political leadership capable of completing the revolution. This remains a vital lesson for the working class in today’s revolutionary movements.

“…The tongue of man is a trumpet of warre, and sedition.” —

Thomas Hobbes De Cive, v. 5

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”

John Locke

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity…Peace is their ruin,…by war they are enriched…Peace is their war, peace is their poverty”

―Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

The discerning reader will recognise that this website is named after Meiksins-Wood’s notable book, ‘A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688’ (1997), co-authored by Ellen Meiksins Wood and her husband Neal Wood. I received the book from my friend Tony Hyland, and its title seemed apt for a site created to share my interest in the English bourgeois revolution. Given that the website has been around for over eighteen years, a review of this book has long been overdue.

It is, without a doubt, an important work in the history of political thought. The book shows how modern political theory, from Thomas More to Hobbes and Locke, emerged as both a response to and an ideological expression of the rise of capitalism in England. Its central claim is that modern political philosophy was shaped not in an abstract world of ideas, but in the real social conflicts produced by agrarian capitalism, enclosure, and the dispossession of the peasantry.

The Woods carefully chose the title A Trumpet of Sedition because it evokes the radical political pamphlet culture of 17th-century England, the era of the Levellers, Diggers, and other popular movements that emerged during the English Civil War. This phrase, originating from the polemical language of that era, was used to describe writings that defied established authority. The Woods use it ironically and provocatively: their book explores how the political theory of that period could both justify the growing capitalist system (as in Hobbes and Locke) and oppose it (as in radical democratic movements later repressed).

Wood’s approach marks a genuine advance on idealist histories of political thought, which treat Hobbes or Locke as merely responding to ideas rather than to material social conditions. Her insistence that political theory must be understood in relation to the class struggles and property relations of its time is fundamentally Marxist in method, even if Wood herself worked within the framework of “Political Marxism” associated with Robert Brenner rather than the classical Trotskyist tradition. 

The Woods and the Historiographical Debate

Lawrence Stone once characterised writing about the English Revolution as navigating a ‘battleground heavily contested, filled with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by fierce scholars ready to fight every inch.” Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood entered a historiographical landscape already shaped by Christopher Hill, the influential Marxist historian of the period. As Ann Talbot’s obituary of Hill notes, his achievements were twofold: he identified the mid-17th-century crisis as a true bourgeois revolution that replaced one class’s dominance with another, and he highlighted the vital role of the masses in revolutions, stressing that a change in consciousness among the people is essential for revolution. His works, The World Turned Upside Down, God’s Englishman, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution*, and Milton and the English Revolution presented a materialist view that influenced a whole generation’s understanding of the era.[1]

The Woods built upon this tradition but added a unique theoretical focus. Their framework, “Political Marxism,” linked to historian Robert Brenner, argues that capitalism began specifically with English agrarian property relations—particularly the competitive dynamic between landlords and tenant farmers that arose from the way feudalism broke down in England, unlike in France or other countries. As a result, the Woods emphasised the connection between property relations and political ideas.

Political Marxism shows significant shortcomings. Although Ellen Meiksins Wood was a thorough theorist of capitalism and its historical evolution, Political Marxism as a movement lacks a cohesive theory of revolutionary organisation, a clear strategy for capturing state power, and any link to the legacy of the Fourth International. It primarily developed and thrived in academic circles—through journals like New Left Review and Historical Materialism, whose social base is centred on left-wing intellectuals rather than the working class itself. This influences the questions it considers and, importantly, which questions it neglects. The crucial debates on revolutionary strategy—such as how workers can break free from trade union bureaucracies, the relationship between the working class and its leaders, and why the Russian Revolution failed are largely missing from Wood’s work.

In A Trumpet of Sedition, it is shown that the great political thinkers from Thomas More (in 1516) through Hobbes and Locke were not just tackling abstract philosophical issues but were also engaging, sometimes secretly and sometimes openly, with the social upheavals caused by the rise of agrarian capitalism. The enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasants, and the commercialisation of agriculture were the material forces that led to the political crises of the 17th century and shaped the political ideas that sought to understand these changes.

Thomas More was another figure of profound ambiguity. His 1516 work, Utopia, is frequently regarded as the first depiction of a socialist community in English. However, Wood sees it not merely as a humanist fantasy but as a sharp critique of the dispossession driven by enclosure. More’s well-known remark about sheep “devouring men” criticises primitive accumulation, a process that Marx later analysed in Capital as the violent severance of peasants from the land. Nonetheless, More was also rooted in the old order, a supporter of the Church. His utopian ideas lacked revolutionary potential; he could imagine an alternative society, but was unable to connect that vision to any class capable of enacting it.

Wood portrays Hobbes as more than just a defender of monarchy. She argues that his responses to social upheaval stemming from capitalism’s rise and conflicts caused by agrarian change are central to understanding his support for a strong sovereign. This stance is seen as a reaction to class conflict and instability, not an abstract view of human nature. Wood challenges the common perspective among some liberal and postmodern scholars that Hobbes was merely a reactionary advocate of authoritarianism. Following Frederick Engels, she places Hobbes among the founders of modern materialism. In her view, Hobbes is positioned alongside Bacon and Locke in a philosophical tradition that, moving from England into the French Enlightenment, influenced the intellectual groundwork for the French Revolution and the development of dialectical and historical materialism.

Thomas Hobbes receives the most philosophically rich treatment. As Ann Talbot’s article carefully establishes, “Hobbes played a vital role in the development of modern materialism and formed a link in a chain that passed from Britain to France that was, in turn, an organic part of the political developments that found expression in the French Revolution of 1789. Dialectical materialism and historical materialism would have been impossible without that earlier development. In his battle against the power of the Church, in his courageous stand for materialism at a time when the vagaries of fate favoured superstition, in his struggle to create a science of politics, and his insistence that no area of experience was not susceptible to scientific analysis, Hobbes was a man who transcended his times. But he was a man of his time and expressed the interests of his class and the experiences of the social layer to which he belonged.”[2]

According to the Woods, Hobbes’s political theory illustrates the transitional phase of early capitalism: the bourgeoisie still required a strong state to ensure the conditions for economic growth, but its authority needed to be based on rational consent rather than divine right. As Talbot points out, “His conception of the state was, in that sense, a modern one rather than a feudal one.” Importantly, Hobbes recognised Cromwell’s Commonwealth as a legitimate sovereign once it demonstrated the ability to maintain order. This stance rendered him ineffective as a royalist propagandist and aligned with his materialist philosophy.

James Harrington, author of *Oceana* (1656), which the Woods also examine, is the thinker most clearly linking property to political power. He argues that how land is distributed shapes the government. This “agrarian law’ idea is essentially a proto-materialist view of politics, reflecting the gentry class’s awareness that had gained victory in the Civil War. They sought a theoretical justification for their political control.

John Locke faces the fiercest ideological critique in this analysis. While mainstream liberal thought regards Locke’s *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) as a foundational theory of natural rights, individual freedom, and limited governance, The Woods challenge this view as a form of class mystification. Locke’s property theory — that labour combined with nature grants rightful ownership — is not a universal principle but a tool used by the agrarian capitalist class. It endorses enclosure and dispossession by framing private property as a natural right that precedes political society. For Locke, the “consent of the governed” actually means the consent of property owners; those without property lack a genuine political voice. According to Locke, liberty is the liberty of those who already possess property.

Levellers, Diggers, and the “Trumpet of Sedition”

The book’s title hints at the suppressed radical currents of the revolution within the bourgeois settlement. The Levellers, led by John Lilburne, advocated for manhood suffrage, freedom of conscience, legal equality, and the elimination of monopolies and tithes. Their 1647 Agreement of the People was a truly democratic constitutional proposal that challenged the limits of parliamentary gentry acceptance. Even more radical were the Diggers, or True Levellers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who believed that genuine freedom depended on the common ownership of land. Winstanley’s writings, blending religious language with radical social ideas, are among the most notable documents of 17th-century political thought.

In 1649, Cromwell defeated the Levellers, and local landowners dismantled the Diggers’ communes with government approval. The Restoration of 1660 further suppressed these movements. The 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution,’ which placed William of Orange on the throne and endorsed Locke’s political ideas as justification, marked the final strengthening of the bourgeois settlement: a palace revolution that safeguarded the propertied classes from both royal absolutism and radical popular movements.

This brings me nicely to the importance of Leon Trotsky’s intervention in the debate over the English bourgeois revolution. Trotsky, in his book Where Is Britain Going? (1925), pointed to “two revolutionary traditions in British history — that of Cromwell in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism. For Trotsky, leadership was decisive, and this is summed up in these words: ” Different classes in different conditions and for different tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and critical, periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority in such of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most sharply and fully. When we speak of dictatorship, we must, in the first place, be clear as to what interests of what particular classes find their historical expression through the dictatorship. For one era, Oliver Cromwell; for another, Robespierre, expressed the historically progressive tendencies in the development of bourgeois society. William Pitt, likewise extremely close to a personal dictatorship, defended the interests of the monarchy, the privileged classes and the top bourgeoisie against a revolution of the petty bourgeoisie that found its highest expression in the dictatorship of Robespierre. The liberal vulgarians customarily say that they are against a dictatorship from the left just as much as from the right. However, in practice, they do not let slip any opportunity to support a dictatorship of the right. But for us, the question is whether one dictatorship moves society forward while another drags it back. Mussolini’s dictatorship is a dictatorship of the prematurely decayed, impotent, thoroughly contaminated Italian bourgeoisie: it is a dictatorship with a broken nose. The ‘dictatorship of Lenin’ expresses the mighty pressure of the new historical class and its superhuman struggle against all the forces of the old society. If Lenin can be juxtaposed with anyone, then it is not with Napoleon, nor even with Mussolini, but with Cromwell and Robespierre. It can be said, with some justice, that Lenin is the proletarian twentieth-century Cromwell. Such a definition would at the same time be the highest compliment to the petty-bourgeois seventeenth-century Cromwell.[3]

The Wood’s Contribution and their Limits

The Woods make a meaningful and enduring contribution in A Trumpet of Sedition. Their focus on interpreting political ideas through property relations and class struggle is inherently Marxist. Highlighting how Lockean liberalism functions as a class-based ideology rather than a universal philosophy is especially important, as is their revival of the revolution’s overlooked radical traditions.

However, the constraints of Political Marxism are also evident. Its tendency to limit capitalism’s origins to English agrarian conditions results in a somewhat narrow analytical scope. More critically, this reflects the academic left tradition that Woods figures in the book excels in historical sociology and intellectual history but remains largely silent on revolutionary strategy and the role of political parties. The Levellers’ defeat was due not merely to an insufficiently radical program but also to their lack of a clear theory of state power and an organisational structure capable of challenging it. Winstanley’s concept of communal ownership was more radical than Lilburne’s constitutionalism, yet neither offered a concrete strategy for seizing political power.

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution was created to address a key issue. In every bourgeois revolution, plebeian and working-class forces are mobilised but ultimately betrayed by the bourgeoisie, which fears social revolution more than the old regime. This lesson is both historical and strategic — the working class must struggle for political independence, led by its own party, aiming not for the completion of a bourgeois revolution but for socialist societal change. The Woods offer a detailed account of how the bourgeoisie in 17th-century England manipulated and later suppressed revolutionary masses. However, their framework lacks a political theory capable of preventing history from repeating itself.

A Trumpet of Sedition is a profound and essential work in materialist intellectual history, recommended for anyone exploring the ideological roots of capitalism. Wood’s approach—placing political ideas within their class context—is genuinely Marxist and offers insightful analyses of figures like More, Harrington, Hobbes, and Locke. Its shortcomings are not in its analysis but in what it omits: the shift from merely understanding the world to actively transforming it, along with the programmatic and organisational issues that the Trotskyist movement has always emphasised as integral to any serious socialist politics.

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

[2] The ghost of Thomas Hobbes-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/hobb-m12.html

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

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution, not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to its victory, its own organisations stood as the chief obstacles.”

Leon Trotsky

“The past is another country. But doing history is, by definition, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Much of what was at stake in Spain remains in present-day dilemmas, at whose heart lie issues of race, religion, gender, and other forms of cultural war that challenge us not to resort to political or other types of violence. In short, as this book’s epigraph exhorts, we should not mythologise our fears and turn them into weapons against those who are different. The Spanish Civil War and all the other civil wars of Europe’s mid-20th century were configured in great part by this mythologising of fear, by a hatred of difference. The greatest challenge of the 21st century is, then, not to do this.”

Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War

“There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no bootlicking, no cap-touching.”

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Giles Tremlett is a competent writer, and his latest book is well-written and thoroughly researched. However, as a liberal journalist, Tremlett approaches the Spanish Civil War from a strongly liberal perspective, which is not just limited but also potentially misleading. This is because the key issues of the conflict are fundamentally political and class-related, topics that liberalism struggles to address honestly.

Tremlett, along with other liberal historians, has long dominated the historiography of the Spanish Revolution. Adam Hochschild referred to this dominant perspective as the “Authorised Version,” which depicts the conflict as a clear-cut battle between democracy and fascism. According to this view, the Republic was defeated by Franco’s stronger military, the non-intervention of Western democracies, and insufficient Soviet aid. Tremlett mainly works within this interpretive framework.

A Marxist approach to history challenges the liberal view of figures like Francisco Franco, emphasising that he cannot be understood without considering the revolutionary crisis he was tasked with suppressing. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was a pivotal event of the twentieth century, representing more than just a clash between democracy and fascism. It was essentially an unfinished workers’ revolution, whose defeat was orchestrated not only by Franco’s troops but also by the Popular Front and Stalinist institutions from within.

Franco initiated his military coup against the Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936. Within days, workers in cities like Barcelona and Madrid, as well as other locations, spontaneously resisted the coup by arming themselves and forming workers’ power committees. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. Franco’s win was not predetermined; it resulted from a political betrayal.

Francisco Franco’s 1939 victory was more political than military. It resulted from the strategic suppression of the Spanish Revolution by what was claimed to be its leftist defenders. To understand Franco, one must recognise the criminality of the pseudo-lefts of that time, mainly the POUM and the Stalinist apparatus it covered for. When the Spanish army launched its fascist coup in July 1936, the working class responded with remarkable spontaneity and strength. In Barcelona, Madrid, and other industrial centres, workers took up arms, formed militias, seized factories, and almost pushed the socialist revolution forward. Franco faced not only a defending republic but a proletariat actively revolting. The key question was whether the movement could find the necessary political leadership to achieve victory.

The influence of the modern-day pseudo-left groups covering for past and present Stalinist treachery persists today. Contemporary pseudo-left groups like the British Socialist Workers Party still endorse the Stalinist view of the Spanish Civil War. Their primary historian, Andy Durgan, wrote a book for students and teachers that systematically justified the Popular Front policies that led to Franco’s victory. Durgan employed a Stalinist approach: denying the existence of dual power in Spain in 1936, dismissing the socialist revolution as a real possibility, and portraying the Popular Front as a class-collaborationist alliance that suppressed the workers’ uprising, thereby presenting the workers’ uprising as the only legitimate and feasible form of government.[1]

As Ann Talbot, who reviewed Durgan’s book sharply, observes, “Durgan’s book reflects the rightward evolution of an entire layer of intellectuals who would at one time have associated themselves with left-wing politics and would even have identified themselves as revolutionaries. The book represents a shift away from the positions that Durgan expressed in his account of the POUM in Revolutionary History. Then the SWP hero-worshipped the POUM and glorified its political errors. Now Durgan is happy to accept a recent modernisation thesis, which depicts the POUM as a reactionary force opposing modernisation. The fact that Ealham must claim in his review that Durgan opposes Graham and Preston and their support for the Popular Front suggests that the SWP is still not ready to go along with this position in its public utterances. But Durgan’s position is a more accurate reflection of the SWP’s current politics and the party’s essentially middle-class liberal character.[2]

Durgan is not a Trotskyist and dismisses Trotsky’s writings on Spain with casual contempt, reducing the political conflict between Trotsky and POUM leader Andres Nin to mere personal animosity. He notes that Trotsky’s criticisms of Nin “seem particularly harsh.” However, as Talbot illustrates, the actual correspondence—letters of Trotsky show a remarkable patience and political clarity—in which Trotsky, even as late as June 1936 and two weeks after Franco’s coup, continued to reach out to Nin and proposed collaboration if Nin would adopt the banner of the Fourth International. The SWP cannot fairly engage with this material because doing so would validate Trotsky’s entire analysis and condemn the Popular Front politics that the SWP has practised throughout its history.

Tremlett’s book on Franco is just one among many of his works that explore the Spanish Civil War. His titles include “Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past” (2006), and “España: A Brief History of Spain” (2022), which highlights Spain’s lack of a singular, unified identity and showcases its rich, multicultural history as its defining trait. Additionally, “The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War” (2020) provides a detailed account of the foreign volunteers who fought against Franco’s forces during the war.

Tremlett’s book on the International Brigades is sympathetic and, by most accounts, thorough in its documentary research. The volunteers who went to Spain, about 35,000 from 50 countries, were often genuinely heroic, motivated by a strong aversion to fascism and a desire to take action. This deserves recognition. However, the Comintern directed the International Brigades under Stalinist control, tying their deployment to the broader political strategy of the Popular Front. This strategy aimed to subjugate the revolutionary workers’ movement to the “progressive” Spanish bourgeoisie and to show Western imperialist powers that Moscow could be trusted to uphold the capitalist order. Unfortunately, many liberal histories of the Brigades tend to overlook this political context honestly.

A further flaw in liberal interpretations of the Civil War, including Tremlett’s view, lies in their treatment of the non-intervention by Britain, France, and the United States. The liberal account suggests that a more supportive stance by Roosevelt or the French Popular Front might have saved the Republic. However, historical evidence shows that the Western “democracies” fully recognised that a revolutionary workers’ state in Spain posed a significant threat to their own class interests. Their “non-intervention” was not accidental but a deliberate class-based policy. Relying on these powers to save the Republic, as the Popular Front strategy aimed to do, was ultimately a political dead end.

This framework deliberately obscures the simultaneous revolution occurring alongside the war. In July 1936, when Franco initiated his coup, Spanish workers countered it in major cities through armed action. They took over factories, collectivised land, formed militias, and created workers’ institutions. The foundation for a socialist revolution was present. As Hochschild’s analysis highlights, this revolutionary effort was not merely an aspect of the conflict but its very essence. Interestingly, it was not Franco but the Popular Front government and the Stalinist Communist Party, acting under Stalin’s directives, that upheld their alliance with the Western bourgeoisie and suppressed these revolutionary movements.

Another shortcoming in Tremlett’s book is the lack of a thorough explanation of how Franco managed to stay in power for so long. His extended rule requires a wider social analysis. Franco’s hold on power until 1975 was not solely due to repression; it also involved the accommodation of Western imperialism, which sought a stable anti-communist base in Iberia, and the Spanish bourgeoisie’s preference for “order” over democracy. The ongoing efforts by the Spanish right—including active-duty officers and the courts to rehabilitate Franco are not just about nostalgia. Instead, they serve as a warning that ruling elites, confronted with renewed class conflicts, are once again considering measures outside the constitutional framework.

The lessons from Spain go beyond mere historical curiosity. Marxists have consistently warned that the attempt by Spanish courts, the military, and the political right to rehabilitate Franco’s legacy reflects a larger global pattern among the ruling class moving toward authoritarianism, driven by austerity, inequality, and escalating class conflict. The answer is not to revive a new Popular Front, which could repeat the failures of the 1930s, but to foster a revolutionary socialist leadership from within the working class.

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[1] Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: Studies in European History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: New York, New York)

[2] Britain’s Socialist Workers Party lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War— http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp2-s17.html 

“If you don’t pay for it, you are the product”,

a 2018 article by Margaret McCartney

“Checking social media is the new opening the fridge when you’re not hungry.”

— Matthew Kobach

“Vulgarity is too mild a word for what unfolded on the steps of the museum, since vulgarity implies a coarse vitality. The 2026 gala was a pageant of decay so far gone in self-parody that one struggled to know whether to laugh, vomit, or check out eBay for a working replica of Dr Guillotin’s invention.”[1]

David North

The Twittering Machine is a provocative and often insightful book, drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural theory, and political economy to argue that social media is not a neutral tool but a machine that reshapes minds.

Oliver Eagleton, in his review of the book, remarked that a “cadre of cyber-utopian theorists” was instrumental in reshaping subjectivity, attracting attention, and profiting from provoking outrage and anxiety. Eagleton commended the book, acknowledging Seymour as a significant voice. He emphasised that the book provides a critical analysis of social media platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook, and similar sites, concentrating on their role as catalysts of addiction and compulsive self-disclosure within the “social industry.”[2]

Eagleton is right to point out the genuine merits in parts of Seymour’s critique.  He points out that the platforms are not neutral public spaces; they are capitalist enterprises whose business model is the commodification of human attention and social interaction. He is right that the dopamine-loop dynamics of “likes,” retweets, and algorithmic amplification are deliberately engineered to maximise engagement at the cost of critical thought. And he is right that the platforms have become instruments of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff has also analysed.[3]

The Pseudo Lefts and Social Media

However, the book’s limitations reflect Seymour’s own political limitations. Seymour is associated with the British pseudo-left, a product of the Socialist Workers Party milieu, who moved toward a kind of post-Marxist cultural politics after the SWP’s crisis. His analytical toolkit leans heavily on psychoanalysis (particularly Lacanian concepts) and Frankfurt School-inflected critical theory rather than on classical Marxism. This leads to some characteristic weaknesses:

Social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack have become dominant spaces where pseudo-left politics often replicates itself, for understandable reasons. The pseudo-left’s focus isn’t on comprehensive political education for workers or on forming a revolutionary party. Instead, it centres on gaining visibility, developing a brand, and wielding cultural influence within a specific segment of the educated upper-middle class. Social media is suited for this because it fosters outrage, identity-driven appeals, and viral controversies, all without requiring a solid theoretical or historical foundation. What looks like “left politics” online is largely a spectacle: hashtag campaigns, call-out culture, aesthetic radicalism, and the promotion of individual influencers as proxies for real political programs. The pseudo-left thrives here because it doesn’t need to organise workers; it only needs to attract followers who already share its class outlook.

The most critical point that liberal and pseudo-left critics of social media systematically miss is the class-directed character of censorship on these platforms. It is not random or neutral. The World Socialist Website (WSWS) was one of the first to document and expose the coordinated campaign by Google, Facebook, and Twitter to suppress left-wing, anti-war, and socialist content. The pseudo left’s response, “break up big tech,” regulate the platforms, and bring antitrust suits, is utterly inadequate. The problem is not that these monopolies are too big; it is that they are private property at all. A society that allows a single individual to own the communications infrastructure through which billions of people engage with public life has already surrendered democratic governance to the capitalist oligarchy.

The Oligarchs and Social Media

A significant flaw in the book is Seymour’s emphasis on sociological and psycho-cultural factors, which undermines a comprehensive class-based analysis. He mainly focuses on subjects, drives, libidinal investments, and the “social industry,” but neglects a thorough materialist critique of platforms as capitalist monopolies. This includes their ties to finance capital, involvement in state surveillance, and crucially, the class struggles of those who control or are harmed by them. The working class, with its unique interests and potential for revolutionary change, is barely discussed. Instead, “users” are portrayed as a uniform group of compulsive individuals, overlooking their exploitation—where their data and attention are appropriated by monopoly capital.

The connection between oligarchs and social media is a vital and complex issue at the core of current politics. This relationship is not accidental; it reflects a basic social truth: the most influential communications system in history is owned and controlled by a few billionaires, who leverage it as a tool for class domination.

In Seymour’s defence, he’s not the only one allowing social media oligarchs free rein. In The Social Dilemma (2020), Jeff Orlowski offers what some critics view as a brave exposé of the social media industry, including interviews with former employees and executives from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other tech giants. It highlights significant concerns about how these platforms influence human psychology and negatively impact society.

However, the WSWS’s Joanne Laurier was heavily critical of the film, saying the “film proceeds to treat social media entirely apart from any discussion of economic life and trends, including the important issue of who owns the giant tech companies and which class interests they pursue. In the movie, the learned “experts” discuss issues such as mental health and threats to democracy entirely apart from the massive economic and social crisis and the moves toward authoritarianism by the ruling elite.

The movie insists that people need to self-censor on social media. If not, the state should step in, as its lead analyst, Harris (himself a millionaire), advocated at the Senate hearing. The real target of mass censorship implemented by the technology giants, on behalf of the state, is the left-wing political opposition, including workers’ use of social media to organise strikes and protests outside existing unions. Google, Facebook, Reddit, and other outlets have systematically targeted the WSWS. Having no social reforms to offer, the ruling elites see censorship and repression as the only means by which to prop up their rule. Consciously or not, the makers of The Social Dilemma offer their services in this endeavour.[4]

What Is to Be Done?

Seymour’s book concludes without suggesting a clear political direction. While criticizing the platforms, the implied solutions are limited to encouraging users to be more reflective or to acknowledge the platform’s underlying logic. It lacks any vision for engaging the working class politically, connecting to the fight for democratic oversight of communication tools, or advocating for the nationalization of platforms under workers’ management. This reflects the characteristic of the cultural-critical approach that has mostly overtaken socialist politics in pseudo-left groups: insightful critique but ultimately powerless.

In sum, The Twittering Machine is a culturally alert but politically limited book. It sees capitalism’s symptoms more clearly than it sees capitalism itself, and it has no perspective for the working class as the agent of social transformation. It is the kind of book that is intellectually stimulating for a certain layer of the educated middle class while leaving the working-class reader with no road forward.

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[1] What is it about the Met fashion gala that leads one to think fondly of the guillotine?

[2] Mind Forged Manacles? New Left Review 120 Nov/Dec 2019.

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

[4] The Social Dilemma: The “curse” of social media- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/20/dile-o20.html

“Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.”

Margaret Cavendish

“For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes

“Thus, Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the eighteenth century, despite all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.”

Frederick Engels- Dialectics of Nature

The first thing that emerges from Francesca Peacock’s 2023 book is that Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch Royalist author and philosopher, was profoundly influenced by the English bourgeois revolution. Although hostile to the revolution and all it stood for, she utilised her unique intellectual voice to understand what was unfolding around her as the world turned upside down.

The English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s was not, as Whig historians preferred to imagine, a constitutional misunderstanding between king and Parliament. According to historian Christopher Hill, it was a genuine class revolution: the rising bourgeoisie, allied with sections of the gentry, overthrew the feudal monarchical order and cleared the ground for the development of capitalism in England. Hill, the greatest historian of this period, demonstrated that the execution of Charles I was not a ghastly mistake but “a complete break with the feudal past,” of profound revolutionary significance. When the people put their king on trial and beheaded him, no subsequent monarch ever sat entirely comfortably on that throne again.

Although she lived over a century before Karl Marx, some left-leaning modern academics and writers who analyse her work through a semi-Marxist lens have even argued that there are strong parallels between her 17th-century natural philosophy and later theories of dialectical materialism. Specifically, her belief in a self-moving, intelligent, and interconnected material world renders her a “precursor” to Marxist dialectical materialism.

This has made Cavendish a genuinely fascinating figure of the 17th-century English bourgeois revolution. A prolific writer across genres (philosophy, poetry, drama, fiction, and early proto-science fiction with The Blazing World), she engaged seriously with the mechanist natural philosophy of her era, debating figures like Descartes, Hobbes, and van Helmont. She was one of the first women admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society. Her intellectual ambitions were remarkable for any person of her time.

The connection between Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes is well worth a look at. Both were central figures in 17th-century English intellectual life, and their relationship illuminates some of the deepest questions in the history of materialism.

Hobbes (1588–1679) was not, as some liberal and postmodern academics would have it, a reactionary ideologue of authoritarianism. He was, as Engels recognised, one of the founders of modern materialism, a thinker who, alongside Bacon and Locke, formed the philosophical chain that ran from England through the French Enlightenment, ultimately contributing to the intellectual conditions that made the French Revolution possible and, beyond it, to dialectical and historical materialism itself.

Hobbes’s connection with Cavendish was both direct and personal. Margaret Cavendish was the wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, the very Cavendish family whose patronage sustained Hobbes for over seven decades. Margaret Cavendish lived at the centre of this intellectual world. During the Civil War and the Interregnum, the Cavendish household, in exile on the Continent, was a gathering point for Royalist émigrés and natural philosophers, and Hobbes was part of this milieu.

Her philosophical position puts her in an interesting relationship to Hobbes. Both were materialists but of significantly different kinds. Cavendish rejected the mechanistic materialism that Hobbes (and Descartes, whom she also engaged with critically) championed. Against the view that matter is inert and moved only by external mechanical force, Cavendish argued for a vitalist materialism: matter itself, she held, is active, self-moving, and possessed of something like perception or cognition at every level. She was also an outspoken critic of the experimental method championed by the Royal Society, arguing (in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666) that telescopes and microscopes distort rather than reveal nature. That reason applied to natural observation without a mechanical apparatus is more reliable.

This is where the contradictions of her class position become interesting. She was an aristocratic Royalist — her husband, William Cavendish, was a leading commander for Charles I, and the family spent years in exile during the Interregnum. Her intellectual freedom was inseparable from her class privilege. Her access to books, philosophical correspondence, and scientific circles was a product of her position at the apex of the aristocratic hierarchy, not a challenge to it. She was not, in any meaningful sense, a “revolutionary”; she was a defender of the old feudal-aristocratic order against the revolutionary bourgeoisie that was remaking England.

The bourgeois revolution she opposed was, at the same time, creating social ferment that was generating the Scientific Revolution, dismantling Aristotelian scholasticism, fostering a new interest in nature as a material reality governed by discoverable laws, and challenging religious authority. The very intellectual tools she used were being forged by the same historical process that had destroyed her family’s wealth and power. She could not entirely escape the spirit of her age, even as she tried to reconstruct the aristocratic world that had been shattered.

As the Marxist writer David North so eloquently put it, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.

Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether man couldn’t change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.”[1]

Peacock’s first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, makes a valuable contribution by rescuing Cavendish from the obscurity imposed by earlier critics who had laid a considerable number of dead dogs on top of her reputation. However, it exemplifies a trend often found in modern cultural biography: the application of contemporary identity-political categories to historical figures. In this case, Cavendish is portrayed through the lens of modern preoccupations, with her eccentricity, gender nonconformity, prolific publication, and resistance to social expectations for women recast as attributes of a proto-feminist “revolutionary”.

This approach reflects more the concerns of today’s upper-middle-class academic culture than the realities of 17th-century England. While reading Peacock’s work critically can yield valuable insights into Cavendish’s intellectual life, the reader needs to maintain a degree of scepticism regarding the “revolutionary” framing. Such a perspective tends to absorb a complex historical figure into present-day identity-political narratives, thereby oversimplifying the intricate class dynamics that characterised the English Revolution.

Cavendish is now celebrated as an early feminist icon. She was the first woman to participate in a Royal Society meeting, boldly published her work despite norms that expected women to stay hidden, and earned the nickname “Mad Madge” for her unconventional behaviour. This recuperation is not entirely wrong, but it is ideologically loaded in a specific way: it abstracts Cavendish’s gender from her class. It presents her eccentricity as a kind of individual heroism.

She stands in this constellation as a paradox: a serious philosophical mind whose very creativity was unlocked by the same revolution she personally mourned. That paradox is not a biographical curiosity; it is a demonstration of the materialist conception of history itself: that the development of human thought is inseparable from the class conflicts that drive history forward.

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[1] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html 

 “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Antonio Gramsci

“The Revolution won’t happen with guns; it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”

Max Horkheimer

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine wheel. I believe the cause lies in the fact that, for the most part, when people write, they forget to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the full import and truth of what they are writing.

Rosa Luxemburg

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S., Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

C. L. R. James

The premise of Andrew Woods’ new book is that “Cultural Marxism” has been weaponised both in the past and in current political struggles. Right‑wing forces use it to explain social change as the work of intellectual conspiracies rather than class struggle.

The use of the term by right-wing and outright fascists is a reactionary falsification that treats social change (civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, critical race and gender studies) as the result of a coordinated, sinister plot by intellectuals, universities and cultural elites to “destroy” Western civilisation. This usage is politically motivated, ahistorical and often antisemitic in its modern forms.

The phrase, as treated in conspiracy literature and included in polemical works such as A. J. A. Woods’s book, is not an accurate description of Marxism as a scientific theory. It is a politicised and ahistorical label that collapses a range of very different intellectual currents into a single bogeyman, used to discredit working-class politics and divert attention from capitalism’s material contradictions.

“Cultural Marxism” circulates as a catch‑all conspiracy theory on the right: an alleged plot by the Frankfurt School and the Left to undermine Western civilisation, attack family values, and “replace” traditional culture. This is not an argument grounded in evidence or history; it is a political weapon. Woods is correct in drawing attention to the right-wing attack on Marxism, but what is more important is an orthodox Marxist understanding of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy, something that Woods is incapable of.

The Frankfurt School

The intellectual currents often lumped together as “cultural Marxism” had distinct social origins and political trajectories. The Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) developed in a period of catastrophic defeats for the European working class and the emergence of middle‑class strata.

Woods’ book devotes a significant amount of space to defending the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and others. These anti-Marxists developed “critical theory” in the 1920s–50s to understand the collapse of mass working‑class revolutionary movements, the rise of fascism, and the cultural forms of modern capitalism. Their outlook was pessimistic and often abstract; it flowed from defeats of the international working class and the ideological disarray of the interwar period—not from any secret plan to subvert society.

As the Marxist David North explains, “The post-modernists and the adherents of the Frankfurt School advance an absurd politics not because their philosophy is absurd. Rather, the crass absurdities of their philosophy arise from their reactionary petty-bourgeois politics. One cannot understand either the Frankfurt School or postmodernism without recognising that the rejection of Marxism and the perspective of a socialist revolution based on the working class constitute the underlying political impulse behind their theories. Postmodernist theory arose quite specifically as a repudiation of Marxism and the perspective of proletarian revolution.

The foundational role of Jean-François Lyotard in its emergence is well known. He is the author of the sentence: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” The “metanarratives” to be discarded were those that advanced the Marxist perspective of socialist revolution. Thus, what is known in academic circles as “postmodernism” would be more accurately defined as “academic post-Marxism.”[1]

North goes on to explain that the Frankfurt School did not represent the revolutionary Marxist tradition embodied in the Fourth International. Its diagnosis—cultural regression, the “self‑destruction of enlightenment”—tended to attribute reaction to abstract cultural processes rather than to concrete class forces and the dynamics of capitalist crisis.

One of the hallmarks of the Frankfurt School was its opposition to the working class’s revolutionary capacity. Wood cites all manner of radicals in the 1960’s that attacked the Fourth International’s “heavy emphasis” on the political independence of the working class and its nature as a revolutionary agent for change.

One of the leading players amongst the radical fraternity who led the attack on the revolutionary nature of the working class was C. Wright Mills. His “Letter to the New Left”, written in 1960, is one of the founding documents of post-war petty-bourgeois radicalism. It is historically significant not for being correct, but for being symptomatic — it gave theoretical expression to a set of demoralizations and class prejudices that would define the New Left and, ultimately, the entire pseudo-left tradition that continues to mislead radical politics to this day.

The core of Mills’ letter is a direct attack on what he called the “labour metaphysic” — the Marxist insistence that the industrial working class is the central revolutionary force in modern society. Mills argued that this was a tired dogma, an outdated faith clinging to mid-19th-century conditions. In its place, he looked to intellectuals and students — the “cultural apparatus” — as the new agents of historical change.

He writes, “What I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to ‘the working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation.”[2]

Wright -Mill’s letter opened the floodgates for a slew of radicals to jump on the bandwagon. One such radical was Max Elbaum, whose Revolution in the Air memoir-cum-history of the “New Communist Movement” — the cluster of Maoist, Marxist-Leninist, and Third-Worldist formations that arose from the radicalisation of the 1960s in the United States.

Elbaum writes, “This book has been written partly to identify the markers on that slippery slope to sectarian irrelevance in hopes of better equipping a new generation to take a different path. But an equally important goal has been to call attention to how dedication to constructing a revolutionary apparatus can act as a potent positive force, unleashing individual creativity, building solidarity across socially imposed barriers, stimulating theoretical exploration, and strengthening activists’ commitment to peace and freedom.”[3]

While it was warmly received in pseudo-left circles as a rehabilitation of that era’s left wing, reading it from the standpoint of classical Marxism reveals it as a deeply misleading document — a celebration of precisely the political tendencies that led a generation of workers and youth into a dead end, and whose legacy helped give rise to today’s identity-politics pseudo-left.

The central problem with Elbaum’s book — and with the New Communist Movement itself — is what it left out: the working class. The radicalisation of the 1960s was real and reflected genuine social contradictions: the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, and the crisis of American capitalism. But the New Communist Movement channelled that energy away from the independent political mobilisation of the working class and into the orbit of petty-bourgeois nationalism. The heroes of Elbaum’s book — Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, the Black Panthers — represent not the Marxist tradition but its systematic falsification.

Identity politics vs Marxism

In chapter four, Woods spends a significant amount of time defending critical race theories and “identity politics”. Critical race theory is sometimes conflated with Marxism by critics on both right and left. The central theme of these theories replaces class analysis with competing forms of sectional politics that can be absorbed into capitalist institutions and the Democratic/centre‑left political apparatus. While racism, sexism and other oppressions are real and must be fought, their proper resolution requires a unifying working‑class strategy rooted in socialist politics—not a fragmentation into rival identities.

As Tom Carter, in his Introduction to Marxism vs Critical Race Theory, writes, “Critical race theory is a broad current, with many tributaries flowing into it and many offshoots flowing out of it. One can go to a library and walk down aisle upon aisle of shelves of this material, which at a surface level comprises many diverse and even internally contradictory trends that have emerged and shifted over time. In characterising this current, it is therefore useful to begin at the most basic level with its fundamental philosophical conceptions, the heritage of which can be traced to postmodernism and to the conceptions advanced by the Frankfurt School. This is the “critical theory” from which “critical race theory” emerges.

In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two leaders of the Frankfurt School, concluded that the Enlightenment was to blame for all the authoritarianism and barbarism that characterised the first half of the 20th century, because it was all the inevitable result of a misguided attempt to exert control over nature through science and reason. Adorno would go on in Negative Dialectics (1966) to claim that all systemic thought is inherently authoritarian.”[4]

Stuart Hall  

Another favourite radical of Wood’s is Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Like many radicals mentioned in the book, Hall’s central theme was the repudiation of the class struggle as the axis of social development, as this assumes that the working class is the decisive agent of political change. Instead, he argued for a turn to the cultural sphere. This was not a Marxist appraisal or critique of culture, but the elevation of “culture” as an arena contested by different “agencies”.

Hall was the founding intellectual of Cultural Studies, the academic discipline centred at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from the 1960s onward. He has been lionised in the liberal-left press as a pioneering theorist of race, identity, and culture. Hall’s career represents a politically coherent, decades-long effort to displace Marxism — specifically the Trotskyist current within it — and substitute identity politics and bourgeois reformism in its place.

In Paul Bond’s excellent obituary of Hall, he makes the following analysis: “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.

Various media commentators have enthused about Hall’s ability to “identify key questions of the age”. History will judge him more harshly: his answers to these questions were confused, misleading and often supine. Despite his supposedly independent “Marxist” stance, Hall’s political outlook throughout his academic and political career aligned him closely with the Euro-communist wing of the old Stalinist Communist Party, and he eventually became a prominent writer for the magazine Marxism Today. The latter served as the ideological godfather of New Labour.[5]

Antonio Gramsci

Wood’s book is full of mentions of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci never used the term “Cultural Marxism. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony — the idea that bourgeois class rule is maintained not just through coercion but through ideological and cultural domination, through the “common sense” of everyday life — is a real and important contribution. The bourgeoisie rules not merely through the police and the army but because subordinate classes internalise its values, assumptions, and worldview. The struggle for socialism, therefore, requires a struggle for ideological and cultural leadership.

Gramsci is an attractive figure for Woods not merely for his cultural writings—many of which were produced during solitary confinement under the Mussolini fascist regime—but also for his attacks on economic determinism, his explicit rejection of the theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification of the nationalist orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure, the line of development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.

Woods is not the only intellectual to use Gramsci for a defence of their own politics. Over the decades, his work has been used by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985) and by a whole generation of “post-Marxist” academics. Gramsci’s work was turned into a rationale for abandoning the working class as the revolutionary subject.

The pseudo-left currents that claim Gramsci’s mantle have produced, in practice, exactly what their theory predicts: subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics. Syriza in Greece is the paradigm case, the most “prominent example of a pseudo-left organisation” that came to power, spouting empty populist phrases, and then carried out “a criminal betrayal” of Greek workers, imposing austerity more effectively than the right could have.

Wood’s book is useful only because it forces the reader to study a Marxist alternative to “Cultural Marxism”. The answer to both the right-wing “cultural Marxism” hysteria and the pseudo-left’s cultural politics is the same: a return to genuine Marxism

Notes

Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique- David North Mehring Books

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[1] Philosophy and Politics in an Age of War and Revolution- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/25/lect-o25.html

[2] “Letter to the New Left” http://www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm

[3] Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che by Max Elbaum, London and New York: Verso, 2002, 370 pages.

[4] Marxism Versus Critical Race Theory-Tom Carter Mehring Books 2023

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

“Future historians will know the General Strike for what it is, a landmark in British history and its most important post-war event.  A general strike is not an accident due to incidental causes, workmen misguided by agitators, the stock shibboleths of the Tory Press. It is a major political phenomenon ultimately springing from the profound dislocation of the entire economic and social system. Nothing else can so move millions of men to united action. It is the class-war in its most acute pre-revolutionary stage: the next stage is revolution.”

C. L. R. James

“The conclusion which I reach in my study is that Britain is approaching, at full speed, an era of great revolutionary upheavals… Britain is moving towards revolution because the epoch of capitalist decline has set in. And if culprits are to be sought, then in answer to the question who and what are propelling Britain along the road to revolution, we must say: not Moscow, but New York.”

Leon Trotsky

“The only class I am afraid of is our own”

J.R. Clynes, Labour Party Politician

“What I dreaded about the strike, more than anything else, was this; if by any chance it should have got out of the hands of those who would be able to exercise some control, every sane man knows what would have happened … That danger, that fear, was always in our minds, because we wanted, at least, even in this struggle, to direct a disciplined army.”

J.H. Thomas, Trade Union Leader

It is hard not to agree with the points made by the Socialist Equality Party in its comments on the 1926 General Strike anniversary: “There are few more bitterly contested and less clearly understood historical experiences than the general strike of 1926, despite it being a decisive moment in the history of the British and international working class.  What will distinguish the SEP’s meetings from the slew of commemorative articles and books on 1926 is an examination of the general strike primarily from the standpoint of the disastrous line pursued by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), led by Joseph Stalin and his allies.”[1]

The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026 is one of many slews published in the last few months. Described as a fresh, accessible history of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary – telling a story of working-class community then and now, “it is one of the better books on the subject. It tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days.

Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Winston Churchill, then Chancellor, feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class. This is social history at its most immediate and relevant.

Both Cant and Lee write for the Notes from Below website. It is a working‑class repository of workplace testimony, petitions and grassroots labour reporting. It performs an important practical function: documenting the lived experience of workers, exposing employer abuses, and creating links between isolated shop‑floor struggles. For that reason alone, such initiatives deserve defence and engagement by socialists. But a class‑struggle analysis requires us to go beyond sympathetic description to evaluate the political and strategic implications of the material and the direction this sort of project advances.[2]

The reappearance of rank‑and‑file initiatives and worker blogs is a product of the deepening crisis of capitalism. As employers accelerate restructuring, automation and outsourcing, and as union bureaucracies increasingly organise class collaboration with management and the state, workers are forced to build their own communication platforms. This social reality accords with the need for independent rank-and-file initiatives and organisations.

Notes From Below primarily offers empirical materials: testimonies, minutes, and petitions. This is indispensable for breaking information blackouts and building solidarity. But empirical documentation by itself is not a political program. Lenin long argued that trade‑unionist economism — which confines politics to immediate economic demands and local grievances — will not by itself develop the conscious leadership required to overthrow capitalist rule; political consciousness must be consciously brought to the working class by a revolutionary organisation. Worker‑produced media can and should serve as a training ground for political education. Still, without explicit political independence and a program that links struggles to the need to overthrow capital, such projects can be outflanked by reformism and the trade‑union apparatus.[3]

So what are the lessons of the General Strike for today’s struggles? Begun on May 3 and officially lasting nine days, it was the first and remains the only general strike ever to have taken place in the UK.

The action was launched in response to a massive attack on the wages of Britain’s 1.2 million coal miners, amid a period of widespread labour unrest. Overseeing the strike, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was terrified by its revolutionary potential and worked to bring it to an end, succeeding on May 12 and enforcing a crushing defeat.

But material conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Political leadership and organisation do. As Chris Marsden explains in his lecture, the decisive factor in the defeat was not only the state’s preparation—organisations for strikebreaking, emergency powers and armed forces—but also the political line imposed by the Comintern under Stalin, Bukharin and Zinoviev. That line subordinated the Communist Party of Great Britain to an alliance with the Trades Union Congress via the Anglo‑Russian Committee, treating the TUC General Council and its “left” representatives as safe conduits for “revolutionary” influence rather than exposing and combating them. The result was a catastrophic political misorientation: the CPGB was transformed into a left‑ginger group for the bureaucracy at the very moment when the class struggle required independent revolutionary leadership.[4]

The general strike of May 1926 was not merely a historical rupture confined to its nine official days; it was a concentrated expression of the objective crisis of British capitalism and the political maturity (and immaturity) of the working class at that historical juncture.  The reader should note that a Marxist materialist analysis locates its significance in the interaction of social forces—the objective erosion of British imperialist power, the consequences of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and the class relations that produced both immense industrial potential and profound political weakness.

The general strike objectively posed “which class shall rule?” The working class in 1926 had the industrial capacity to disrupt capitalist reproduction yet lacked a party capable of transforming industrial militancy into political power. As Marsden’s 1926 strike lecture emphasises, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Comintern-influenced Communist Party acted to contain and demobilise revolutionary potential. The result was a strategic defeat whose lessons include the catastrophic consequences when the labour bureaucracy or opportunist “lefts” substitute themselves for proletarian political independence.

A century later, objective conditions again make a general strike a live political possibility. Global capitalism is convulsed by stagnation, inflation, war and austerity. It is important to see the connection between the historical weaknesses exposed in 1926 and the present-day degeneration of unions and reformist parties. The trade union apparatus today often functions as a corporatist arm of capital, seeking to manage and suppress rather than lead independent working-class offensives.

The social weight of the working class, its international integration, and the development of rank-and-file initiatives create objective conditions far more favourable to revolutionary politics than those that existed in 1926.

1926 is not an exhausted archive; it is a living repository of lessons for 2026. Capital’s crisis, the bankruptcy of union bureaucracies and the emergence of rank-and-file militancy mean the objective possibility of a general strike—and with it, the political question of power—again stands on the agenda. The working class must learn from the past not to repeat its errors: organise democratically in the workplaces, coordinate internationally, and build the independent revolutionary leadership necessary to turn strikes into a socialist strategy. The future is written in the material contradictions of the present; the past supplies the lessons to read it.

Notes

The General Strike at the National Archives- http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-general-strike/

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[1] Socialist Equality Party (UK) announces public meeting series on 1926 general strike-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/09/fhfg-a09.html

[2] https://notesfrombelow.org/

[3] See (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?).

[4]. The new pamphlet by Mehring Books (UK), “Trotsky, Stalin and the 1926 British General Strike: Lessons For Today”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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