Professor John Morrill’s inaugural Barry Coward Memorial Lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, was by any measure an impressive scholarly performance. Morrill is one of the most accomplished historians of the English Revolution working today, and his five‑volume edition of Cromwell’s writings — supported by a substantial Leverhulme grant — will now become the definitive textual resource for future scholarship. His tribute to Barry Coward was warm, sincere, and entirely fitting.

But Morrill’s lecture, and the monumental editorial project, also expose the deeper limits of contemporary Cromwell studies. It reveals a historiographical method that is technically rigorous yet politically anaemic; a scholarship capable of restoring Cromwell’s words with unprecedented precision while leaving the social and class content of the English Revolution fundamentally untouched.

From a Marxist perspective, Morrill’s method exemplifies the wider trend in bourgeois historiography: focusing on textual precision and individual agency, which masks the revolutionary forces of the 1640s and the social classes that shaped Cromwell. This essay presents a summary of Morrill’s lecture alongside a Marxist critique of its underlying historiographical approach.

Morrill’s Project: Restoring Cromwell’s Voice

Morrill has produced a much-needed scholarly project: a detailed, critically edited collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings. Current editions—Carlyle’s romanticised 1845 compilation and Lomas’s 1904 revision—are full of errors, missing details, and editorial changes. Morrill’s team of eight editors produced the most accurate text yet by examining all manuscripts and printed editions, aiming to eliminate two centuries of inaccuracies.

The example he offered — two versions of Cromwell’s speech opening the Barebones Parliament highlights the issue. A 1654 version refers to “the day of the power of Christ,”. In contrast, a later edition softens this to “a day of the power of Christ,” subtly transforming Cromwell from an apocalyptic prophet to a devout statesman. Morrill contended that these modifications add up to a significantly changed perception of Cromwell. The project is undoubtedly valuable, as it aims to provide scholars with the most precise texts of Cromwell ever compiled. However, ensuring textual accuracy does not necessarily mean that the historical understanding will be equally precise.

The Fetish of Accuracy: A Technical Solution to a Political Problem

Morrill’s lecture consistently focused on the importance of “accuracy.” He pointed out Carlyle’s carelessness, Lomas’s slight improvement, and Abbott’s strong ideological stance. Morrill’s edition aims to address these issues. However, this focus on textual precision reveals a broader methodological belief: that understanding Cromwell depends on finding his “true” words. This approach reflects scholarly obsession — the idea that the authentic sentence will reveal the genuine Cromwell.

A Marxist perspective emphasises the importance of class struggle in understanding Cromwell’s words. Whether he referred to “the day of the power of Christ” or “a day” is less important than analysing the social forces behind his speech. The key questions are: what social interests motivated Cromwell’s language, and how did it serve revolutionary goals? Morrill’s method falls short because it views Cromwell’s speeches as isolated entities, ignoring their role as ideological expressions shaped by class interests.

Cromwell as a Figure Re‑Made to Suit Ruling‑Class Needs

Morrill recognised that each century has its own version of Cromwell—whether Carlyle’s Victorian hero, Abbott’s proto-fascist leader, or the moderate constitutional figure of the mid-century—each reflecting the ideological needs of its time. However, Morrill did not explore the deeper implication: Cromwell’s image is not merely misinterpreted but is intentionally constructed as a political tool. Bourgeois historiography repeatedly reimagines Cromwell to reinforce the ideological foundations of the modern British state. From a Marxist perspective, Cromwell cannot be viewed as a timeless “great man.” Instead, he must be seen as the political representative of an emerging bourgeois class whose interests called for the dismantling of feudal absolutism, the creation of a national market, the consolidation of capitalist property, and the suppression of plebeian democratic movements. This is the version of Cromwell that bourgeois historiography refuses to acknowledge—and thus remains invisible.

Against Revisionism: The Bourgeois Evasion of the English Revolution

For over forty years, “revisionist” Civil War scholarship has held sway in the British academic world. It claims to be objective, fact-based, and opposed to Whig history. However, it is actually the most politically cautious interpretation ever used to analyse the English Revolution. Its main accomplishment has been to undermine the idea of revolution itself—instead portraying a major historical turning point as merely a collection of local conflicts, religious feelings, and personal miscommunications.

Revisionism’s approach is straightforward: break down, remove politics, and dissolve distinctions. While earlier thinkers viewed history as a revolutionary clash between social orders, revisionists see only “multiple kingdoms,” “local contexts,” and “parish politics.” Where Marxists highlight the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of feudal absolutism, revisionists claim class is “anachronistic,” “over-systematised,” or simply “not evident in the sources.” Similarly, movements like the Levellers and Diggers, originally seen as democratic and proto-communist, are reinterpreted by revisionists as “pressure groups,” “agitators,” or “political minorities.”

The outcome is a historiography where events lack intentional causes, especially social ones. The English Revolution appears as a chain of accidents. Cromwell is seen as a man responding to crises. The New Model Army is viewed as a disciplinary issue. Ireland is considered a tragic misunderstanding. Radicalism is dismissed as mere noise. This is not genuine scholarship; it is ideological suppression.

Revisionism appeared in the late 20th century, coinciding with the British academy’s move away from social history, class analysis, and materialist views. It presents a reassuring story: the Civil War was not a revolution but just a “war of three kingdoms.” Its participants are seen not as representatives of social forces, but as individuals driven by religious differences. Its conclusion is not the end of feudalism but just a constitutional adjustment. Essentially, revisionism rejects the revolution to dismiss its repercussions.

It cannot acknowledge that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It cannot acknowledge that Cromwell was the political instrument of a rising class. It cannot acknowledge that plebeian movements represented the unfulfilled democratic content of the struggle. It cannot acknowledge that revolutionary violence was structurally necessary.

Instead, it presents a Cromwell who is psychologically nuanced but socially insubstantial, a Parliament that is complex in structure yet devoid of class distinctions, and a revolution that paradoxically isn’t truly a revolution. This is why revisionism has become so appealing to the modern academy: it sanitises history. It strips away the explosive elements of the 1640s—the overthrow of monarchy, the mobilisation of people with low incomes, the rise of democratic calls, and the development of capitalist social relations—and substitutes a politically neutral mosaic of “contexts.” A Marxist critique pierces through this illusion. The English Revolution was not a mistake, nor a local crisis, nor a religious conflict. It was the first major bourgeois revolution, and its contradictions—its radicalism, violence, and repression of democratic forces—mirror the conflicting interests of the class driving it. Revisionism fails to recognise this because it cannot accept it. Its goal isn’t to explain the revolution but to diminish its significance.

Ireland and the Politics of Sanitisation

The most insightful part of Morrill’s lecture focused on Ireland. He highlighted uncertainties in casualty numbers, questioned the reliability of Cromwell’s letters, and noted Parliament’s tendency to “tidy up” his words. He carefully differentiated between civilians killed in combat and those killed after surrender. While this stance of meticulous neutrality seems objective, it serves a political purpose by diverting attention from the underlying reality: the Irish campaign was an element of the brutal consolidation of a new bourgeois state.

The Drogheda massacre—regardless of how its details are reconstructed—was not merely a tragic mistake. It was a calculated act of terror executed by a revolutionary force whose triumph depended on dismantling the ancient Irish order. Morrill’s approach, by emphasising textual uncertainty, downplays the revolutionary violence central to the English bourgeois revolution.

Morrill’s approach exemplifies the broader shift towards revisionism in Civil War historiography. This perspective critiques the traditional Whig narrative of constitutional progress, replacing it with an equally ideological focus on local grievances, religious sensitivities, and individual agency. It breaks down the revolution into a series of contingencies, interprets class struggle through cultural anthropology, and views Cromwell as a psychologically intricate individual managing crises. Instead of seeing the revolution as driven by material forces, it portrays it as a patchwork of personal decisions. Conversely, a Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell was not merely contingent but a necessary outcome—shaped structurally by the decline of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The Erasure of Radical Movements

A key aspect of Morrill’s historiography is how it downplays radical movements. Levellers, Diggers, and Army agitators—the democratic and proto-communist groups of the 1640s—are only seen as “pressures” on Cromwell, not as independent class movements driven by their own historical logic. Cromwell’s suppression of these groups is viewed as political prudence, not as a reflection of his role in defending property and supporting the “gentlemen Independents.” This approach is not objective scholarship; it reduces plebeian politics to mere background noise, ideologically diminishing their significance.

The Cleaned Portrait Without the Canvas

Morrill concluded his lecture with a metaphor: Cromwell is like a Great Master painting that takes on a new life when cleaned and restored. The metaphor is insightful—Morrill restores the portrait but leaves the canvas untouched. The Cromwell he depicts is precise in text but stripped of political context, portraying him as a man of conscience rather than a revolutionary. A Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell’s significance lies not in his personality but in his role as the military and political representative of a rising bourgeoisie, both triggering and holding back revolution. Morrill’s approach cannot uncover this deeper, class-based understanding of Cromwell because it doesn’t address the class dynamics of the English Revolution.

Morrill’s edition will be invaluable, providing the most precise collection of Cromwell texts to date. However, it won’t answer the fundamental question Morrill asked: What do we truly know about Oliver Cromwell? To truly understand Cromwell, we must grasp the class forces that drove him to power, the economic changes that enabled the revolution, the social tensions that influenced his religious rhetoric, and the historical necessity that positioned him as the figurehead of a rising bourgeois class. Achieving this understanding requires a Marxist analysis—an approach that the bourgeois academy has largely avoided for decades. Morrill’s project cleaned the portrait. It will not reveal the painter.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources on Revisionism

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. A foundational critique of revisionist approaches, surveying Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Paul Christianson, and others.
• Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford University Press, 1979. A key text in the revisionist dismantling of long-term social explanations.
• Russell, Conrad. The Origins of the English Civil War. Macmillan, 1973. The central revisionist statement rejecting class-based interpretations.
• Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. Longman, 1980 (orig. 1976). A major revisionist work emphasising localism and provincial grievances.
• Sharpe, Kevin (ed.). Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. Oxford University Press, 1978. A revisionist collection emphasising political culture over social structure.
• Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Journal of British Studies 15:2 (1976), 40–75. A revisionist attack on Marxist and Whig causal frameworks.
• Ashton, Robert. The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603–1649. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Often grouped with revisionists for its scepticism toward long-term structural causes.

Responses to Revisionism

• Hexter, J. H. “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England.” Journal of Modern History 50:1 (1978), 1–50. A rebuttal defending structural and ideological explanations.
• Hill, Christopher. “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 100–124. A Marxist counter-argument emphasising popular mobilisation.
• Rabb, T. K. “The Role of the Commons.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 55–78. A critique of revisionist minimisation of parliamentary radicalism.
• Hirst, Derek. “The Place of Principle.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 79–99. A defence of ideological and principled motivations against revisionist reductionism.

Marxist and Social-Historical Works

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972. The classic Marxist study of Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian radicalism.
• Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. Foundational Marxist interpretation of the revolution as a bourgeois upheaval.
• Bernstein, Eduard. Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution. Allen & Unwin, 1930. A pioneering Marxist analysis of radical democratic and proto-communist movements.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Heinemann, 1976. A major social-history rebuttal to revisionism, emphasising class mobilisation.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 2006. A detailed study of radical class forces suppressed by Cromwell.
• Shaw, A. L. The Levellers. Longman, 1968. A key study of democratic radicalism within the New Model Army.

Historiographical Context

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. Essential for situating revisionism within broader historiographical debates.
• Rosenberg, John S. “Toward a New Civil War Revisionism.” Journal of Modern History. Although focused on the American Civil War, it provides a comparative framework for understanding revisionist cycles in national historiography.

For nearly two decades, debate over slavery and capitalism in the United States has been shaped by the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC), a loose group of scholars whose influence reflects less intellectual strength than the deep disorientation of contemporary bourgeois scholarship. Arising after the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of neoliberal triumphalism, the NHC has sought to offset its theoretical weakness through extensive empirical accumulation. Its central claim—that plantation slavery was integral to capitalist development—is correct, but it reaches that conclusion without grasping capitalism itself.

This is no accident. The NHC is a petty-bourgeois ideological formation rooted in academic middle layers whose outlook is marked by hostility to Marxism, suspicion of theory, and retreat into descriptive empiricism. Its scholars have produced vast archival detail yet remain unable to explain the structural relationship between slavery and capitalism. Their work reflects a wider crisis: the abandonment of historical materialism in the universities and the rise of identity politics, moralism, and methodological fragmentation.

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History enters at this moment of theoretical collapse. More than a contribution to slavery historiography, it directly challenges the petty-bourgeois drift of contemporary scholarship. It restores Marxist method to a field that has grown uncertain of its capacity to explain the world.

McNally counters long-standing caricatures by showing that Marx understood Atlantic plantation slavery as capitalist commodity production and the enslaved as a “chattel proletariat.” This is more than a small interpretive correction: it decisively refutes the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free wage labour, a view that obscures its global, violent, and coercive development.

The Argument: A Systematic Reassertion of Historical Materialism

McNally’s book proceeds in two parts. First, through case studies of Richard Ligon’s account of Barbadian sugar production, George Washington’s role as an agrarian capitalist slaveholder, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonial labour, it shows that plantation slavery bore the defining marks of capitalist production: production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, and constant pressure to raise productivity.

The second part shifts to political economy, showing how capital derived from slavery helped shape modern financial institutions, including the Bank of England, and later influenced the development of American capitalism. The conclusion is clear: slavery was not outside capitalism but structurally central to it.

McNally places his work within a “forgotten critical Marxist tradition” of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, all of whom rejected the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free labour. By reviving this tradition, he exposes the NHC’s theoretical bankruptcy: its attempt to explain capitalism without Marx and slavery without class analysis.

Where the Book Succeeds: Restoring Class Struggle to the Centre of the Narrative

The book’s strongest contribution is its analysis of enslaved resistance. Liberal historiography has often reduced rebellion, sabotage, and flight to moral testimony or narrative detail. Despite its empirical breadth, the NHC largely repeats this pattern, treating enslaved resistance as an outside disruption rather than a structural feature of capitalist production.

McNally breaks sharply with this approach by recasting enslaved resistance as labour struggle, structurally comparable to strikes, slowdowns, and collective bargaining. In doing so, he restores the enslaved to their proper place as historical agents contesting the conditions of production and reproduction. This is a genuinely original contribution that gives his theoretical framework real explanatory force. His prose is clear, forceful, and historically grounded; planter diaries, travel accounts, and slave narratives function not as ornament but as evidence of the lived reality of capitalist exploitation.

David McNally and the 1619 Project: Marxism Against the Petty‑Bourgeois Rewriting of History

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History appears at a moment of profound ideological confusion. Few examples reveal this more clearly than the rise of the 1619 Project, a political and cultural intervention embraced by parts of the media and academia as a definitive reframing of American history. In fact, it marks the culmination of a petty-bourgeois ideological turn: replacing historical materialism with racial essentialism, class analysis with moral narrative, and revolutionary perspective with political demoralisation.

Although not written as a direct reply to the 1619 Project, McNally’s book stands in sharp theoretical opposition to it. While the 1619 Project casts slavery as a story of racial continuity and national guilt, McNally emphasises the structural, global, and capitalist character of New World slavery. Rather than treating slavery as the permanent essence of American society, he locates it within the development of the capitalist mode of production—a system driven not by racial metaphysics but by profit, accumulation, and class domination. The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The 1619 Project: A Petty‑Bourgeois Politics of Race

The 1619 Project is not a serious historical intervention but a political project grounded in the outlook of the upper-middle-class layers that dominate contemporary cultural institutions. Its method replaces historical materialism with racial essentialism, presenting American history as an unbroken chain of racial oppression from the arrival of enslaved Africans to the present. This narrative serves clear ideological functions: it collapses class into race, erasing capitalist exploitation; substitutes moral condemnation for structural analysis, reducing history to a record of injustice rather than social forces; denies the revolutionary agency of the working class by portraying American society as permanently defined by racial hierarchy rather than class struggle; and aligns with the interests of affluent professional strata, who use racial discourse to claim moral authority while preserving their own class position.

The 1619 Project’s hostility to Marxism is deliberate. It reflects the political needs of a social layer threatened by genuine materialist analysis, which would expose the class basis of exploitation and the capitalist state’s role in sustaining inequality.

McNally’s Intervention: Restoring Marxism to the Debate

McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism directly challenges this ideological drift. His claim is not merely that slavery was linked to capitalism, a point the 1619 Project acknowledges only superficially, but that slavery was a form of capitalist production governed by the same structural imperatives that shaped wage labour. This distinction is decisive. Where the 1619 Project treats slavery primarily as a racial institution, McNally shows it was a capitalist institution driven by production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, relentless pressure to raise productivity, and integration into global circuits of finance and credit. By recovering Marx’s writings and the tradition of Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, McNally exposes the theoretical bankruptcy of approaches that reduce slavery to racial essence rather than analysing it as a capitalist relation.

Enslaved Resistance: Class Struggle, Not Racial Allegory

One of McNally’s key contributions is to recast enslaved resistance as labour struggle. This sharply contrasts with the 1619 Project, which presents resistance mainly as racial testimony: a moral counter-narrative rather than a structural feature of capitalist production. McNally instead restores the enslaved as historical agents engaged in class struggle, contesting the conditions of production and reproduction within capitalism. This is a fundamentally Marxist insight, and it is absent from the 1619 Project’s racial-moral framework.

Why the 1619 Project Cannot Explain Slavery

The 1619 Project cannot explain slavery because it cannot explain capitalism. Its framework is moral rather than material, racial rather than structural. It presents slavery as America’s original sin, not as a global capitalist institution embedded in world markets, finance, and imperial expansion. McNally, by contrast, shows that slavery was not an aberration but a central mechanism of capitalist accumulation; that the enslaved were not racial symbols but workers subjected to capitalist discipline; that the plantation was not simply a racial institution but a capitalist factory in the fields; and that resistance was not merely racial defiance but class struggle within a coercive labour regime. In short, McNally explains slavery because he explains capitalism; the 1619 Project explains neither.

Marxism Against Petty‑Bourgeois Revisionism

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is more than a scholarly study; it is a necessary intervention in a historiographical field shaped by petty-bourgeois racial politics and theoretical fragmentation. Despite its cultural influence, the 1619 Project retreats from materialist analysis, recasting the history of slavery as a narrative of racial permanence. McNally’s book restores what that project cannot: the structural, global, and capitalist character of slavery; the agency of enslaved workers as participants in class struggle; and the indispensable role of Marxist theory in explaining the modern world’s development.

Where It Meets Resistance: The Petty‑Bourgeois Fear of Theory

The sharpest critique of McNally comes from a review in the Journal of Social History, which objects that McNally is engaged in theoretical reconstruction rather than conventional archival history. This criticism is revealing. It reflects the methodological conservatism of contemporary academic history, which has increasingly abandoned theory in favour of empiricism and treats conceptual clarity as a threat rather than a necessity.

The objection that “historians and theorists do different kinds of work” is not a methodological point but an ideological one. It expresses the petty‑bourgeois fear of totalising explanation — the fear that a coherent analysis of capitalism might expose the social foundations of exploitation and the class character of the academy itself.

The NHC’s refusal to engage with Marx is not an oversight. It is a political stance. It reflects the ideological position of a stratum that seeks to critique capitalism’s excesses while preserving its foundations, and that therefore cannot tolerate a genuinely materialist analysis.

McNally’s insistence on theoretical coherence is therefore not a flaw but a strength. It is a challenge to a historiographical field that has retreated from explanation into description and from analysis into moralism.

A Necessary Marxist Intervention in a Field Adrift

Slavery and Capitalism is not a conventional historical monograph. It is a theoretically ambitious and politically necessary intervention into a debate dominated by empiricism, identity politics, and methodological fragmentation. McNally demonstrates that Marx’s framework, properly understood, already contains the tools needed to explain the relationship between slavery and capitalism — tools the NHC has lacked and attempted to replace with descriptive accumulation.

Whether or not one accepts McNally’s full theoretical argument, his reframing of enslaved resistance as labour struggle is a major contribution. His recovery of a critical Marxist tradition is timely and essential. And his critique of the NHC exposes the limits of a historiography that has attempted to understand capitalism without Marx.

For scholars engaged in the debate over slavery and capitalism, McNally’s book is a serious, provocative, and necessary work — one that restores historical materialism to a field that has drifted far from it.

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History was published by the University of California Press in September 2025.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Works by David McNally

• McNally, David. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025.
• McNally, David. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.
• McNally, David. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso, 1993.
• McNally, David. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Ideology and Politics. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.

II. Marx, Engels, and the Classical Marxist Tradition

• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume II. London: Penguin, 1978.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin, 1981.
• Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1973.
• Marx, Karl. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004.
• Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

III. The Critical Black Marxist Tradition (Du Bois, James, Wynter)

• Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998 (orig. 1935).
• Du Bois, W.E.B. The World and Africa. New York: Viking, 1947.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989 (orig. 1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of Pan-African Revolt. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1969.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102.

IV. The New History of Capitalism (NHC)

Core Works

• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
• Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Representative Articles

• Rockman, Seth. “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (2016): 335–350.
• Beckert, Sven. “History of American Capitalism.” In Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by Louis Cain et al., 1–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

V. The 1619 Project

Primary Texts

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole, ed. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021.
• The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. Special Issue, August 18, 2019.

Key Essays (Original Magazine Issue)

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written.”
• Desmond, Matthew. “To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.”
• Kendi, Ibram X. “The Anti‑Blackness of American Democracy.”
• Berry, Mary Frances. “How Segregation Shaped American Education.”

VI. Critiques of the 1619 Project

Marxist and Materialist Critiques

• Reed, Adolph. “The 1619 Project and the Racialization of Everything.” Catalyst 3, no. 4 (2020): 1–20.
• Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, February 2020.
• WSWS Editorial Board. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of History.” World Socialist Web Site, September 2019.
• North, David. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.

Academic Critiques

• Wilentz, Sean. “A Matter of Facts.” The Atlantic, January 2020.
• Oakes, James. “The 1619 Project and the Origins of the Civil War.” Catalyst 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–30.
• McPherson, James M. Interview in WSWS, November 2019.
• Bynum, Victoria. “The 1619 Project and the Problem of Historical Truth.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 2020.

VII. Slavery, Capitalism, and Political Economy (General Scholarship)

• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997.
• Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London: Verso, 2011.
• Tomich, Dale. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labour, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
• Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Race in the Twenty‑First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

VIII. Political Economy, Finance, and Empire

• Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
• Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1968.
• Inikori, Joseph. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

IX. Useful Archival and Primary Sources

• Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1657.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A View of the Art of Colonisation. London: Parker, 1849.
• Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
• Slave Narratives (WPA Federal Writers’ Project), Library of Congress.

Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic offers a lively account of Britain from 1649 to 1660. Still, beneath its refined language, it reveals a strong ideological stance: the suppression of the revolutionary aspects of the English Civil War and Interregnum. Keay writes not as an independent scholar but as a longstanding member of Britain’s heritage sector—“she writes from within the institutions that exist to manage and curate Britain’s official historical memory”—and her book aligns closely with the political goals of those institutions.

Her framing reveals a clear bias. The title, The Restless Republic, depicts the Interregnum as a pathological deviation — a nation unable to “settle” — suggesting it was a temporary disruption in the natural order. The subtitle, Britain Without a Crown, emphasises absence, implying that monarchy is the default state of political life and that its absence is a cosmic mistake. This approach is not objective history but ideological signalling.

The Revisionist Orthodoxy Repackaged for a Popular Audience

Keay’s work aligns well with the post-revisionist consensus that has dominated academic history since the 1970s. Revisionists like Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Kevin Sharpe systematically challenged the Marxist interpretation put forward by Christopher Hill. Their core argument, now widely accepted, is that “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie” and that the Civil War was mainly an avoidable mistake, resulting from Charles I’s political errors.

Keay presents this orthodoxy confidently, as if she has never needed to defend it. Her story focuses on elite figures — Cromwell, Lambert, Monck, and the Rump — whose actions are seen as the main causes of history. The mass movements from below — the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists — are shown only as interesting side notes or annoying disruptions. The class forces behind the revolution are ignored. This is intentional. It serves the ideological purpose of revisionism: to diminish the English Revolution’s revolutionary significance and portray it as merely a constitutional debate among aristocrats.

Keay vs Hill: Two Histories of the English Revolution, Two Visions of Britain

Anna Keay and Christopher Hill differ not just in their academic specialities but also in their perspectives on history: one emphasises Britain’s heritage institutions, while the other aligns with Marxist and revolutionary ideas. Comparing Keay and Hill illustrates that discussions about the English Revolution also reflect broader debates on Britain’s political identity and future.

Keay functions within Britain’s official historical memory framework; she writes from within the institutions that exist to manage and curate Britain’s official historical memory.” Her positions at English Heritage and the Landmark Trust place her directly in the system responsible for preserving, interpreting, and showcasing the national history to the public.

Hill was a Marxist historian influenced by the mid-twentieth-century intellectual movements, including the workers’ movement, anti-imperialist struggles, and global revolutions. He viewed the seventeenth century not as a mere heritage but as a conflict zone of class interests. In contrast, Keay’s perspective is conservative, focused on institutions, and seeks to restore traditions. Meanwhile, Hill’s outlook is revolutionary, grounded in materialist analysis, and internationalist.

Keay’s framing is notably negative. Her title, The Restless Republic, depicts the Interregnum as a period of instability, unrest, and a nation out of sync. The subtitle, Britain Without a Crown, highlights what is missing — the monarchy — suggesting that the natural order has been temporarily halted. In contrast, Hill’s framing is more positive. He views the 1640s–1650s as the first significant bourgeois revolution in European history. The execution of Charles I is seen not as an accident but as a pivotal historical event that marks a fundamental break.  “When the people execute their king… it has a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.” While Keay perceives absence, Hill perceives emergence. Where Keay sees chaos, Hill recognises transformation. What Keay considers an interlude, Hill interprets as a revolution.

Keay’s narrative centres on elite figures—Cromwell, Lambert, Monck, and the Rump—while the common people are hardly more than background noise. The Levellers and Diggers are seen as curiosities rather than main actors. This approach exemplifies the revisionist view: history is shaped mainly by elite misjudgments, constitutional crises, and personal conflicts.

Hill’s work reestablishes agency among the masses, illustrating how the rising bourgeoisie, agrarian capitalists, and the “middling sort” challenged the feudal nobility. He highlights the Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, and radical sects as manifestations of broader social forces unleashed during the revolution. Hill emphasises that understanding the English Revolution requires recognising the central role of class struggle. While Keay depicts England ruled from above, Hill depicts an England transformed from below. Keay inherits the revisionist dogma that the Civil War was essentially avoidable — a tragic accident caused by Charles I’s political incompetence and the breakdown of the “ancient constitution.”

Hill completely rejects this view. He sees the Civil War as the inevitable result of a deep social change: the emergence of capitalist relations within a collapsing feudal system. For him, the conflict was not accidental but a fundamental clash between two incompatible modes of production. While Keay views the Civil War as a constitutional failure, Hill considers it a necessary revolution.

Keay views the Restoration of 1660 as a return to rationality — a re-establishment of the natural order following a period of risky experimentation. This aligns with the classic Whig perspective: Britain’s strength lies in moderation, continuity, and steering clear of continental extremes. Conversely, Hill considers the Restoration a political compromise. The monarchy was reinstated, but only on conditions that maintained the core achievements of the revolution — primarily safeguarding bourgeois property. The old regime was not simply restored; it was made subordinate. Keay’s Restoration symbolises a homecoming, whereas Hill’s version is a settlement enforced by victorious social forces.

Keay’s work, like much of established historiography, plays a political role: to erase Britain’s revolutionary roots and promote the myth of peaceful, gradual change. As your document highlights, this tradition spans from the late seventeenth century through Macaulay to the present day. Trotsky’s critique of Macaulay also applies to Keay: “vulgarises the social drama… with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.” Hill’s work takes a different stance: to emphasise the revolutionary nature of the English Revolution, to bring class struggle back to the forefront, and to link the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century with the socialist revolution of the future. Keay’s history offers comfort; Hill’s history invites challenge.

What Keay Cannot Admit: The Revolution Was Real.

The Marxist analysis, shaped by Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Hill, views the 1640–1660 events as Europe’s first major bourgeois revolution. Keay cannot accept this because it would mean recognising that Britain’s modern state emerged not gradually but through a break—marked by civil war, regicide, and the overthrow of feudal absolutism.

Charles I’s execution was not merely a mistake but a historic act: “when the people execute their king after a solemn trial… it has a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.” Consequently, no monarch remained securely on the throne until the late 19th century.

This act was driven by deep social forces. The growing bourgeoisie—merchants, capitalist farmers, and the “middling sort”—faced a feudal nobility whose economic base was deteriorating. The Civil War wasn’t just an internal elite dispute but a class struggle, with emerging economic forces dismantling the old political power.

The revolution sparked mass movements whose demands exceeded the cautious goals of the gentry. The Levellers called for democratic rights and the end of aristocratic privileges. The Diggers claimed the earth as a “common treasury.” Radical sects foresaw a complete overhaul of the social order. Cromwell harshly suppressed these movements—not because they lacked relevance, but because they threatened to push the revolution beyond the boundaries needed for capitalist property relations. This is the true drama of the English Revolution. Keay’s narrative fails to include it.

The Restoration Myth and the Sanitisation of Britain’s Past

Keay’s book continues a long tradition of sanitising Britain’s revolutionary origins. Since the late seventeenth century, the ruling class has preferred to frame its legitimacy around the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688—a peaceful palace coup—rather than the turbulent events of the 1640s. Macaulay, a prominent Whig historian, turned the revolution into a comforting myth of steady, peaceful progress. As Trotsky noted, “Macaulay vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes.”

Keay modernises this tradition for the twenty-first century. The Interregnum is depicted as a tumultuous, unsuccessful experiment and a cautionary tale against radical shifts. The Restoration is seen more as a return to rationality rather than merely a political compromise that safeguarded the core achievements of the revolution, especially the preservation of bourgeois property. Her book isn’t mere crude propaganda; rather, it functions more subtly as an institutionally embedded narrative that renders revolution unthinkable by concealing it.

Why This Matters Today

The debate over how to interpret the English Revolution is more than just academic; it reflects a wider ideological campaign against the very idea of revolution. The revisionist shift of the 1970s happened alongside the suppression of workers’ struggles, the rise of postmodernism, and a move away from class analysis. Disputing the occurrence of a bourgeois revolution in seventeenth-century England is akin to denying the proletarian nature of 1917—it essentially removes revolution from history.

Keay’s book is a well-crafted addition to this topic. It reassures readers that radical breaks are deviations, that it is elites who shape history, and that overthrowing oppressive systems is neither essential nor beneficial. The goal isn’t to dismiss Keay’s work but to uncover its ideological underpinnings. The English Revolution should be recognised as a crucial moment in global history—a bourgeois revolution whose contradictions and successes highlight the route toward the socialist revolution, an ongoing goal of our era.

Margaret Willes’s The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn exemplifies more than just a flawed book; it highlights a broader intellectual decline in modern historiography. A retreat from social analysis characterises this decline, the abandonment of class as a key historical category, and the transformation of history into a refined part of the heritage industry. Willes’s work serves as yet another instance of a widespread trend in academia and publishing—portraying history as a lifestyle rather than an analytical discipline.¹

The book’s premise is simple: Pepys and Evelyn were curious individuals and keen observers of Restoration England, with diaries that provide charming glimpses into a vibrant era. While this follows the typical bourgeois-antiquarian pattern, it is also historically unjustifiable.

Pepys and Evelyn lived “through and after the greatest social upheaval England had ever experienced.”² They were not mere floating personalities in a timeless Restoration scene. Instead, they were actors—though minor—who revealed much in the aftermath of the English bourgeois revolution. To dismiss them as eccentric hobbyists, as Willes does, undermines their historical significance and reduces the Restoration to a depoliticised space of wigs, gardens, coffee houses, and domestic trivia. This shift is more than an interpretive mistake; it is an act of ideological shaping.

The Academic Abdication: Class Removed, Revolution Denied

Modern historians have mostly set aside the Marxist ideas that once fuelled serious research on the 17th century. Today, Christopher Hill’s work—often seen as outdated by many scholars—still stands as the only comprehensive framework for understanding that era. Hill showed that the mid-17th-century crisis dismantled one social class’s dominance and installed another.³ This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of historical fact.

Yet Willes, like her peers, writes as though the English Revolution never occurred. The Civil War becomes background noise. The Commonwealth is reduced to a curiosity. The Restoration is treated as a return to normality rather than a class compromise forced upon a frightened bourgeoisie. The Glorious Revolution is barely acknowledged as the culmination of capitalist consolidation.⁴ This is not ignorance. It is avoidance.

Pepys and Evelyn: Not Curiosities, but Class Representatives

Pepys was not a gossiping flâneur. He was a bureaucrat of the capitalist state. His diary is saturated with the machinery of empire—shipbuilding, naval contracts, colonial administration. As the accompanying document notes, this was “the apparatus of a nascent capitalist state projecting its power across the globe.”⁵ Pepys’s rise through the Admiralty reflects the increasing importance of administrative competence in a society transitioning from feudal personal rule to capitalist state rationality.

Pepys exemplifies what Ellen Meiksins Wood has described as the “political form of capitalist social relations,” in which the early modern state becomes increasingly central to the organisation of economic life.⁶ His diary reveals the emergence of bureaucratic rationality, contract management, and logistical planning—key features of the developing capitalist state.

Evelyn was more than just a gentleman gardener; he was an innovative scientist whose Sylva was created to fulfil the navy’s timber needs. His interests in pollution, architecture, and horticulture mirrored the bourgeoisie’s rationalist ideals. As a Royal Society member, he played a key role in shaping bourgeois science. Engels recognised this well: contemporary science arose from the breakdown of the medieval worldview under the pressure of capitalist progress.⁷ Willes perceives the Royal Society as a charming assembly of inquisitive individuals, reflecting the commonplace liberal view. However, in actuality, the Society served as a tool for maintaining class dominance. Its focus on empirical research, experimentation, measurement, and progress aligned with the interests of a growing capitalist elite. Fields such as navigation, metallurgy, ballistics, forestry, and colonial mapping were not merely genteel hobbies but the technical backbone of capitalist growth.⁸ To present the Royal Society as an apolitical intellectual salon is to falsify its historical function.

Bourgeois Antiquarianism: The Ideology of Contemporary History Writing

Willes’s book exemplifies “bourgeois antiquarianism.”⁹ This is not simply a methodological flaw; it is an ideological stance. It is the refusal to acknowledge that history is shaped by class struggle. It is the displacement of social conflict by personality, of revolution by anecdote, of material forces by domestic interiors.

The World Socialist Website (WSWS) has criticised this trend repeatedly, most recently in its appraisal of Lucy Worsley, whose work “consistently displaces class antagonism, economic crisis, and mass political struggle, fixating on monarchs, courtiers, domestic interiors and historical cosplay.”¹⁰ Willes belongs to the same school: history as entertainment, history as escapism, history as depoliticised spectacle. This is not accidental. It reflects the ideological needs of the present bourgeois order, which seeks to naturalise itself by erasing the revolutionary processes that created it.

The Academic and Media Establishment: A Catalogue of Evasion

Let us speak plainly. The contemporary historical establishment has abandoned the English Revolution. It has abandoned class analysis. It has abandoned materialism. It has abandoned the very concept of historical causality. Worsley’s output—generously funded, heavily promoted, and ever-present—embodies the essence of bourgeois-antiquarian kitsch. As the WSWS pointed out, her work repeatedly shifts focus away from class conflict, economic crises, and large-scale political struggles, instead emphasising monarchs, courtiers, domestic settings, and historical cosplay.¹¹ Willes’s book belongs to precisely this tradition: history as costume drama. Other historians follow a similar path. One being David Starky.

Starkey’s extensive career has centred on the idea that history is primarily shaped by monarchs, courtiers, and individual personalities. He is widely known for his disdain for social history. His impact has been damaging, as he contributed to fostering an intellectual climate where a book like Willes’s could be published without shame.¹² Antonia Fraser’s Restoration biographies are elegant but politically vacuous. They treat the 17th century as a theatre of personalities rather than a battleground of classes. Her approach has shaped public expectations of the period, encouraging precisely the depoliticised reading Willes reproduces.¹³ Simon Schama stands out as the most polished in the group, but his work ultimately portrays a liberal-bourgeois narrative that highlights continuity, compromise, and national identity. His perspective on the English Revolution is somewhat vague and sentimental, and it sidesteps class analysis.¹⁴ He has helped normalise the idea that the Revolution was a cultural moment rather than a social rupture.

These historians are not purely neutral chroniclers but ideological architects. Their influence has cultivated a cultural setting in which the English Revolution is either minimised or overlooked, thereby enabling Pepys and Evelyn to be seen as charming eccentricities rather than as representatives of a burgeoning class consolidating its authority.

The shift from viewing history as heritage is more than a cultural trend; it’s a political move. When historians avoid addressing class issues, they make the past incomprehensible and the present fixed. This creates a world where social conflicts vanish, revolutions are unthinkable, and the bourgeoisie seems timeless. Pepys and Evelyn become mere charming curiosities instead of symbols of a class whose victory transformed England and established modern capitalism. Willes’s book isn’t just lacking; it reflects a wider intellectual surrender.

Restoring History to History

It is time to say openly what many historians privately acknowledge: the field has been intellectually captured by a bourgeois‑antiquarian sensibility that is hostile to social analysis and allergic to class. The English Revolution has been domesticated. Pepys and Evelyn have been trivialised. The Restoration has been aestheticised.

A Marxist critique restores what Willes and her peers omit: class, revolution, contradiction, and the emergence of the capitalist state. Pepys and Evelyn were not eccentric diarists. They were functionaries and intellectuals of a class consolidating its power after a revolutionary upheaval.

Their diaries are not curiosities. They are instruments of history. Contemporary historians who refuse to confront this reality are not writing history. They are producing ideology.

Footnotes

1. For the concept of “heritage history,” see Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen, 1987).
2. Previous Draft, p. 2.
3. Christopher Hill, The English Revolution 1640 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940), 7.
4. J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967).
5. Previous Draft p. 3.
6. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1999).
7. Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883).
8. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
9. Previous Draft p. 4.
10. WSWS, “Lucy Worsley and the Politics of Heritage History,” accessed 2024.
11. Ibid.
12. See David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2002).
13. Antonia Fraser, King Charles II (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979).
14. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The British Wars 1603–1776 (London: BBC Books, 2001).

Anne Frank’s diary stands as one of the most widely read human records of the twentieth century, yet its historical importance has often been misrepresented. It is frequently depicted as a universal moral symbol—symbolising innocence lost to “evil” and serving as a beacon of hope during dark times. This sentimental view is intentionally crafted to align with the ideological interests of the postwar capitalist system, transforming the Holocaust into an abstract moral lesson that disconnects from the social and political factors behind it. As a result, this leads to a significant distortion of history.

A Marxist analysis starts from a different perspective. Anne Frank’s fate is not separable from the crisis of global capitalism from 1914 to 1945. The First World War broke down the old European order and sparked a period of revolutionary upheaval. The German working class, Europe’s most potent and politically advanced, entered history with remarkable revolutionary potential. However, the betrayal by the Social Democratic Party—especially its support for the Kaiser’s war in 1914 and its suppression of the Spartacist uprising in 1919—left the working class disoriented and demoralised. The later decline of the Communist Party under Stalinism, marked by the disastrous “social fascist” line of the late 1920s, further deepened political paralysis. During this time, the working class was divided precisely when unity was most needed.

Trotsky examined this disaster with exceptional clarity. In his writings about Germany from 1930 to 1933, he argued that fascism was more than just a reaction; it was a counter-revolution—the mobilisation of the furious petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram against the proletariat. He described fascism as “the most savage expression of the decay of capitalism,” a movement that emerged when the bourgeoisie could no longer uphold its rule via parliamentary methods. Trotsky explained that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was closely linked to his hatred of the working class. The Jew was used as a symbol representing Marxists, Bolsheviks, and revolutionaries. Anti-Semitism was called  “the socialism of fools”—a fake explanation for social crises that misdirected anger away from capitalists and toward a vulnerable minority.

Trotsky’s insights into the Jewish question are crucial for grasping Anne Frank’s story. He dismissed both Zionism and assimilationism as ineffective solutions. According to him, Jews are a “people-class” dispersed by capitalism and made vulnerable during its crises. In a 1938 appeal to American Jews, Trotsky forewarned: “It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war.” He stressed that only a victory for the international working class could avert disaster. The tragedy of Anne Frank’s life is that Trotsky’s warnings went unheeded—not for lack of clarity, but because the working-class organisations that claimed allegiance to them refused to act.

Fascism did not originate from metaphysical ideas, cultural illnesses, or the longstanding German anti-Semitic tradition. Instead, it was a deliberate counter-revolutionary tool used by the bourgeoisie to suppress the working class and uphold capitalist property systems. The Holocaust represents the extreme manifestation of this logic, involving the mass extermination of millions during a war of colonization against the Soviet Union and a social counter-revolution aimed at erasing the impact of 1917. Anne Frank’s diary, written inside the cramped Secret Annex, is a human record created amid this tumult of historical forces. Her thoughts on war, inequality, and societal irrationality—such as “Why do governments give millions each day for war, when they spend nothing on medicine or poor people?”—are not accidental. They reflect, in raw form, the awareness of a young person living at the heart of capitalism’s slide into barbarism.

After World War II, the way Anne Frank’s legacy was managed was influenced by Cold War ideology. The same nations that denied Jewish refugees in the 1930s later celebrated Anne Frank as a moral figure—since icons like her do not threaten capitalist interests. Her diary was decontextualized, serving as a symbol of broad “tolerance,” while ex-Nazis found roles within West Germany’s government agencies, including the CIA-controlled Gehlen Organisation and the BND. Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested the Franks, was never convicted and lived out his days unpunished. In this way, memory was sanitized and historical truth was distorted.

Trotsky foresaw this distortion. He cautioned that the bourgeoisie would attempt to turn the crimes of fascism into abstract metaphysical concepts, disconnected from the class struggle. He emphasised that truly honouring fascism’s victims requires understanding the social forces behind it and developing a revolutionary movement to prevent its future rise.

Ignoring Trotsky’s analysis has clear consequences today. Across Europe and the U.S., far-right groups are resurging. These fascist movements are actively supported by parts of the ruling class, with funding, weapons, and political backing. The rise of fascism isn’t due to “extremism” or “populism,” but reflects capitalism’s failure to resolve its internal conflicts through democratic processes. The diary’s importance now is strategic, not just commemorative. Anne Frank’s story is not just history; it’s a warning for the future.

Honouring Anne Frank means facing the reality of the world that led to her death. It involves recognizing, as Trotsky argued, that fascism arises when capitalism fails to sustain its dominance through parliamentary systems. It also requires understanding that the Holocaust was not an accident but a direct consequence of imperialism and counter-revolution. Furthermore, it demands acknowledging that preventing such tragedies again calls for the deliberate, coordinated action of the global working class against capitalism.

Anne Frank once said, “I want to go on living after my death.” She has achieved this, but the significance of her survival hinges on current political struggles. Her diary endures not merely as a symbol of despair but as a powerful call for historical awareness and revolutionary effort. The ongoing struggle for human emancipation—halted by fascism, compromised by reformist approaches, and distorted by Stalinism—continues to be the most critical challenge of our era.

This article situates The Diary of a Young Girl within the historical context that produced it. Anne Frank’s voice endures because it is inseparable from the crisis of capitalism. To honour that voice is to confront the system that silenced it—and to build the socialist movement capable of ensuring that such crimes never recur.

Anne Frank’s voice persists because it is fundamentally linked to the crisis of capitalism. Honouring her voice means confronting the system that silenced her and creating a socialist movement that prevents such crimes from happening again.

Christopher Thompson’s recent writing offers a sober critique of Marxist views on the English Revolution. However, it essentially follows a familiar revisionist pattern: pulling away from structural analysis, refusing to consider the socio-economic changes of the 16th and 17th centuries, and portraying the Civil Wars as merely “un grand soulevement” instead of a crucial turning point in the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The author’s stance is not just anti-Marxist; it’s anti-historical, as it dismisses the long-term processes that contributed to the crisis of the 1640s. This counter-essay aims to outline the dialectical framework of the English Revolution and show why the revisionist view fails under close examination.

The Revisionist Premise: Politics Without Structure

Jonathan Healey’s main assertion is definitive: “There was no ‘bourgeois revolution’, no preceding ‘class conflict’, and certainly no ‘feudal/absolutist state’.” This statement is more of a negation than an argument; it claims that there is no structural conflict by highlighting the lack of explicit anti-commercial policies. However, Marxist historiography does not rely on the idea that the Tudors or early Stuarts deliberately aimed to suppress capitalism. The shift from feudalism to capitalism results from inherent contradictions within the relations of production, rather than royal intent.

The revisionist position collapses because it equates structure with policy. It assumes that if monarchs encouraged trade, then no structural impediment existed. This is a category error. Absolutism was not defined by hostility to commerce; it was defined by the attempt to preserve the political supremacy of a landed ruling class in conditions where market relations were expanding beneath them. The author’s argument is therefore premised on a misunderstanding of what Marxists mean by “feudal” and “absolutist.”

The Long Transition: Agrarian Capitalism and Class Formation

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, significant socio-economic changes occurred: Enclosure increased, leading to a landless rural proletariat. Tenant farming evolved towards competitive leasing and market-driven production. London’s rapid expansion fostered a national market and a rise in commercial bourgeoisie. The gentry grew, shifting from static feudal landlords to capitalist farmers and investors. Meanwhile, the state’s fiscal crisis worsened as traditional feudal revenues proved insufficient for a modernizing government.

These developments are well-documented in manorial records, court rolls, probate inventories, and by historians ranging from R.H. Tawney to Robert Brenner. However, the author of the document overlooks all this evidence. Instead, they claim that population growth up to 1630 happened “without major conflicts,” suggesting that the lack of peasant revolts indicates social harmony. Yet, class conflict doesn’t always manifest as open rebellion. It can be seen in litigation over enclosure, disputes over customary rights, wage struggles, religious polarization, and political alliances driven by economic interests. A single spark did not cause the English Revolution; it was the culmination of a century of structural transformation. 

The State as a Site of Contradiction

Thompson dismisses the idea of a “feudal/absolutist state,” but in reality, the early Stuart monarchy embodied that very form. It aimed to uphold the dominance of a landowning elite while increasingly relying on capitalist economic activities. This created a sharp contradiction: the Crown needed revenue, yet its traditional sources were insufficient. Since Parliament controlled taxation, the monarchy tried to impose extra-parliamentary levies such as ship money and monopolies. These actions alienated both gentry and merchants. Additionally, religious conflicts intensified political divides, and the issue of multiple kingdoms deepened the crisis. This wasn’t just a random “great uprising”—it was the political manifestation of systemic tensions in a society in transition. The author’s refusal to recognize this isn’t humility but a form of theoretical blindness.

Supporters of King and Parliament were present at every societal level. This fact is accurate but not relevant, as class is defined by one’s relationship to the means of production, not political loyalty. The fact that individuals with similar class backgrounds chose different sides shows that class conflict persists, with ideology, religion, and political culture acting as mediators. Marxists have never claimed the Civil Wars were fought by purely self-aware bourgeois armies waving banners of capitalism. Instead, they see the political crisis as revealing deeper socio-economic contradictions. Revisionism fails because it insists on a simplistic, mechanistic class alignment that no Marxist historian has ever endorsed.

Christopher Hill and the Straw Man

Thompson seeks to undermine Marxist historiography by highlighting changes in Christopher Hill’s work. However, Hill’s development was not a repudiation of Marxism; rather, it was an evolution. His initial focus was on class conflict, while his later work highlighted the bourgeois outcomes of the revolution. This shift is not inconsistency but dialectical progress. Hill recognized that: the revolution did not immediately establish capitalism but destroyed political barriers to its development, created a state structure compatible with market relations, and hastened the emergence of a bourgeois political culture. Therefore, the author’s dismissive view of Hill is superficial, as it misinterprets both Hill’s intellectual evolution and the Marxist approach.

The Restoration Was Not a Royalist Victory

“A great uprising … which ended in a Royalist victory in and after 1660.” This characterization is historically inaccurate. The Restoration was a negotiated compromise that retained many of the revolution’s gains: the monarchy was restored, but absolutism was not. Parliament’s dominance was maintained, the fiscal-military state grew, agrarian capitalism advanced, and the bourgeoisie gained influence. The Glorious Revolution finalized this process. If this is considered a “Royalist victory,” it is a peculiar one—one that undermines the very foundations of Royalist power. The author’s assertion appears rhetorical rather than analytical.

The Necessity of Structural Explanation

The revisionist view outlined in the document is not only incorrect but also insufficient. It fails to account for key developments such as England’s long-term socio-economic changes, the state’s fiscal crisis, political polarization in the 1630s and 1640s, the ideological radicalization of the New Model Army, the abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords, and the rise of a state aligned with capitalist growth. Marxist historiography can explain these phenomena, as it doesn’t reduce the revolution solely to class conflict but places political events within societal contradictions during structural change. The English Revolution was not merely a “great uprising”; it was a pivotal break in the shift from feudalism to capitalism. Denying this is to deny the course of history itself.

“Why do governments give millions each day for war, when they spend nothing on medicine or poor people?

Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl, entry of 3 May 1944.

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

 — Elie Wiesel

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist… Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” — Martin Niemöller

“It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.

Leon Trotsky

In 2022, Rosemary Sullivan’s The Betrayal of Anne Frank was withdrawn by its Dutch publisher after its main claim was proven unfounded. This wasn’t just a correction of an academic error but also a revealing sign of how Holocaust historiography is progressively degrading under modern capitalism. The book falsely claimed there was a “Jewish betrayer” responsible for the Frank family’s arrest—an allegation based on guesswork, misinterpretation, and pseudo-forensic showmanship. Despite its flaws, major media outlets endorsed and heavily promoted the book, only retracting it after experts showed its claims fell apart under minimal examination.

The Sullivan affair exemplifies a wider trend: the shift of the Holocaust from a historical event tied to capitalism, imperialism, and class conflict into a depoliticized morality story, a detective mystery, and ultimately a tool used by the ruling class for ideological purposes.

The Individualization of Fascist Crime

Sullivan’s core argument in “Who betrayed Anne Frank?” is flawed. It suggests that the moral failure of a single person is the key to understanding Anne Frank’s death, which resembles crime fiction more than historical analysis. Anne Frank was not betrayed by an informant; she was murdered by the Nazi regime—an instrument of German financial capital in its most brutal form. The relentless search for a single betrayer serves an ideological purpose: it simplifies a complex historical atrocity into a moral failure, shifting focus from social forces to finding a villain.

This pattern is now widespread. Popular Holocaust stories—memoirs, films, museum exhibits, and “cold case” investigations—mainly highlight personal accounts, moral conflicts, and psychological profiles. The Holocaust is seen as a platform for individual heroism or guilt, while the broader social, economic, and political factors that led to fascism are overlooked. This focus on individualisation is deliberate, aligned with modern bourgeois ideology, which struggles to recognise the link between fascism and capitalism without condemning itself.

From Historical Event to Cultural Commodity

The public perception of the Holocaust has significantly evolved over time. In the years right after World War II, its memory was influenced by survivors, scholars, and political groups who saw fascism as stemming from a crisis within capitalism. The genocide was closely linked to the fall of bourgeois democracy, the betrayal of the working class by Social Democracy and Stalinist regimes, and Germany’s imperialist ambitions for dominance.

By the late 20th century, the way Holocaust memory was presented changed significantly. Museums, films, memoirs, and educational programs multiplied, but their focus shifted mainly to personal stories, moral lessons, and emotional engagement. As a result, the Holocaust evolved into a universal symbol of “evil,” losing touch with its specific historical context.

This commodification fulfills a specific ideological role by turning the Holocaust from a political incident into a commercial commodity. It replaces critical analysis with emotional appeal, factual history with storytelling, and class conflict with individual tragedy. As a result, the Holocaust is transformed into a brand—one that is referenced, consumed, and marketed—rather than a cautionary tale about risks associated with capitalist crises.

The Reactionary Function of the “Jewish Betrayer” Narrative

Sullivan’s book specifically aimed to identify a Jewish betrayer, not just any traitor. This choice is deliberate and significant. The image of the Jewish collaborator—such as a Judenrat official, kapo, or informant—has historically been employed to blur the moral distinctions of the Holocaust and suggest a false “shared responsibility” between victims and perpetrators. In reality, these individuals operated under extreme coercion and degradation, and their actions, though morally complex, were driven by the totalitarian system of extermination. However, the political implications of emphasising these figures depend entirely on the surrounding context.

Currently, promoting a “Jewish betrayer” narrative serves reactionary goals: it downplays fascist crimes by implying Jews were partly responsible for their own fate. It fuels far-right ideas that aim to diminish accountability for German imperialism. Additionally, it supports the German state’s cynical use of Holocaust remembrance to justify its backing of Israel’s actions in Gaza and its wider militarist goals. institutions like the Buchenwald memorial have prohibited criticising Israel under the pretence of fighting antisemitism, thus exploiting Holocaust memory for modern imperialist aims. In this environment, seeking a Jewish betrayer is not just misguided but also politically perilous.

The Pseudo‑Science of the Cold Case Method

Historians like Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Bart van der Boom, and others challenged Sullivan’s claims by showing that the book’s main accusation was based on speculation, misinterpretation, and a lack of understanding of historical context. The so-called “smoking gun,” an anonymous note from after the war, lacked any real evidence. The supposed betrayer, Arnold van den Bergh, was already in hiding by 1944. When examined critically by scholars, the entire case fell apart immediately.

The core problem is methodological. The cold-case approach views history as a solvable puzzle using forensic clues, rather than recognizing it as a complex social process influenced by class forces. This pseudo-scientific method, borrowed from criminal investigation and the true-crime genre, appeals to the desire for narrative closure and a definitive villain.

This method is fundamentally anti-historical. It fails to recognize the Holocaust as a result of capitalism in crisis, imperialism, and the collapse of the working-class movement. Instead of providing analysis, it resorts to speculation; instead of offering context, it leans on conjecture; and rather than presenting history, it seeks entertainment. The appeal of these approaches mirrors the ideological demands of bourgeois culture, which favours soothing stories over confronting uncomfortable realities.

The Real Betrayal: The Collapse of Working‑Class Leadership

From a Marxist perspective, the key betrayal enabling Anne Frank’s death was not carried out by any single informant, but rather by the organisations professing to represent the working class, which ultimately betrayed them.

The Social Democratic parties surrendered to their national bourgeoisies well before Hitler rose to power. Meanwhile, the Stalinist bureaucracy placed the fight against fascism behind its diplomatic tactics, resulting in the 1939 Hitler–Stalin Pact. The Communist Party of the Netherlands, which had organised the brave February 1941 strike—the first large-scale protest against the Nazis in Europe—was politically rendered powerless by Stalinism and unable to lead a revolutionary movement. Without a revolutionary socialist movement, the working class was left vulnerable to fascism.

This is the true historical lesson of the Holocaust. It is also the lesson that bourgeois historiography tries to hide by focusing on individual morality and betrayal stories.

The Contemporary Stakes: Memory as Ideology

The Sullivan affair must be seen within a larger crisis in our understanding of history today. As capitalism encounters new difficulties—such as war, authoritarian states, and economic recessions—the ruling class often manipulates historical memory for its

Three key trends are apparent: firstly, the commercialisation of Holocaust remembrance, turning it into a product disconnected from its political significance and aimed at consumerism; secondly, the depoliticisation of fascism, viewed as a moral flaw or anomaly rather than a result of capitalist crises; and thirdly, the exploitation of Holocaust memory to justify modern militarism, nationalism, and imperialism. Within this context, the Sullivan affair exemplifies how Holocaust history is being ideologically compromised in a capitalist system.

Conclusion: The Necessity of Revolutionary Leadership

Anne Frank’s words from May 3, 1944—“Why do governments give millions each day for war, when they spend nothing on medicine or poor people?”—challenge decades of ideological distortion. Her question isn’t a moral dilemma; it’s a political critique of a capitalist system that fosters war, poverty, and genocide.

Her death teaches us that the real lesson isn’t to pursue informants after eighty years, but that the working class must create its own revolutionary party—free from capitalist, nationalist, Stalinist, and social-democratic influences—to stop the barbarism that took her life from returning. This barbarism isn’t just history; it’s an active threat, nurtured by the same capitalist system that is pushing the world toward a third world war.