(This is an AI-generated summary of the above lecture using Plaud Note)
This lecture by David North interrogates the trajectory of the United States amid an accelerating political and constitutional crisis, situating it within a global breakdown of capitalist democracy and the rise of oligarchic rule. Framing the decisive question “Where is America going?” in both objective (material forces, economic relations) and subjective (mass consciousness and response) terms, North adopts Trotsky’s historical method of posing strategic questions during periods of acute class conflict. He characterises the U.S. situation as “going to hell in a handbasket,” highlighting the rapid tempo of destabilisation, including Donald Trump’s denunciations of Democratic legislators as “treasonous” and calls for capital punishment after they urged the military to refuse illegal orders violating constitutional oaths. He notes the intersection of political leadership with U.S. intelligence agencies, underscoring the contested nature of civil-military relations and the legality of such relations.
Expanding beyond immediate developments, North argues that the apparent authoritarian reconfiguration of American governance after the 2024 election reflects a terminal crisis of global capitalism, driven by extreme inequality, financialization, fictitious capital, debt expansion, and erosion of the dollar’s credibility. He employs historical analogies (France before 1789, Chile 1973, U.S. slavery-era measures) to depict oligarchic aggression and spectacle—billionaire-dominated policymaking, symbolic restorations of reactionary iconography, and conspicuous consumption within state institutions—as symptoms of direct oligarchic rule. Internationally, he traces parallels with Britain under Keir Starmer and other governments, arguing that similar structural pressures produce convergent authoritarian trajectories.
The lecture critiques reliance on moral appeals absent a scientific socialist program centred on the working class, contending that war, militarisation, and genocide are ruling-class countermeasures to capitalist contradictions. North analyses the Marxist foundations of value and surplus value, rising constant-to-variable capital ratios, and the falling rate of profit; he contends that AI-driven automation intensifies these contradictions by displacing living labour—the source of surplus value—while delivering uneven, limited productivity gains. He rejects reliance on rival capitalist states (China and Russia), emphasising internationalist working-class unity (including between Russian and Ukrainian workers) against imperialism and national chauvinism.
North advances a strategic orientation built on transitional demands—expropriation of capitalists, factory committees, nationalisation under democratic control—and the necessity of a vanguard party to develop socialist consciousness. He underscores the degeneration of bourgeois leadership and the crisis of revolutionary leadership, asserting that U.S. mass sentiment trends left despite betrayals by the pseudo-left. In practice, he calls for organising rank-and-file committees, restoring Marxism’s authority through education on 20th-century revolutions and betrayals, and deploying new tools such as “Socialism AI”—an application trained on the WSWS archive and Marxist literature—to scale outreach, provide programmatic clarity, and assist in organising working-class struggles. The event concludes with a call to join the Socialist Equality Party and to build an internationally coordinated movement capable of resolving capitalism’s contradictions through conscious action.
It is with profound sadness that I hear about the death of Alan Gelfand, who truly was a fighter for socialism. I never met Alan, and I regretfully cannot call him my friend, but his struggle had a profound bearing on my own political development.
The conclusion of his struggle against the Socialist Workers Party (US) in 1983 coincided with the year I became involved in the Trotskyist movement. After a year as a supporter, I finally joined the WRP before the split, which was, in itself, a seminal moment for me. Although, as a teenager, I spent well over a thousand pounds on Marxist literature from the then Militant Tendency, they had nothing on the history of American Trotskyism. After the split, the then minority held classes on American Trotskyism.
I read James Cannon’s “The Struggle for a Proletarian Party” and many other works. I still have the books in my Library. Again, it was during the Split that I became familiar with the history of recent American Trotskyism, as embodied in the struggles of the Workers League. One thing that always struck me was the high level of camaraderie among the American comrades. They were on a different political and intellectual level and somewhat inspiring. Meeting Jean and Bill Brust was a thrill of a lifetime.
The first time I heard about the Security and the Fourth International (I had purchased a copy of How the GPU Murdered Trotsky but never read it, a bad habit that continues to this day) was when I read David North’s articles on the Death of Tom Henehan. Leon Trotsky and the development of Marxism, 1982, was published in the Young Socialists paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These articles were reprinted in the pages of the Young Socialist in 1984. I always read the YS paper as it contained far more interesting articles than the Newsline, which seemed more of a comic to me at the time. I learnt nothing about Trotskyism from it.
It was during the split that I learnt not only about the Security and the Fourth International investigation, but it was my first introduction to Gelfand’s struggle. During the division, a large number of internal documents were circulated by the minority. A large number of these documents pertained to security and the Fourth International. But it was only with the release in 1985 of the two books The Gelfand Case: A Legal History of the Exposure of U.S. Government Agents in the Leadership of the Socialist Workers Party – Volumes One and Two (1 and 2/ I and II), Paperback that I really began to fully understand the havoc caused by the murderous agents of the GPU.
Gelfand will always have a special place in my political heart. It is inspiring that he faced death with the same approach he had to life, as the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Finally, as David North wrote, “In his final words to a comrade and close friend, Alan said: ‘It’s hard to say goodbye. But I have joy in my heart and a smile on my face, and confidence in the movement and in my comrades.” Alan Gelfand will never be forgotten. His place in this history of the Fourth International and the hearts of his comrades is secure.”[1]
Notes
Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
Harold Robbins Archive-https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/wag_175/
Register of the Socialist Workers Party records-https://oac.cdlib.org/static_findaids/ark:/13030/tf1k40019v.html
[1] Alan Gelfand: A fighter for socialism and historical truth-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/11/08/eprm-n08.html
“I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”
Clayborne Carson
“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of enslaved Negroes who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.”[1]
Martin Luther King
“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”
Genesis 37:19-21
The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. To create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had mainly borrowed from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.
Leon Trotsky
Clayborne Carson, PhD, was commissioned by Martin Luther King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to be the editor of the massive collection of papers that King had left behind. The majority of these papers were held in the King Centre for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. When Coretta Scott King initially selected him for the project in 1985, Carson estimated it would take around 20 years to complete, a deadline that has long passed. It will take several historians to complete the task. The King family will direct the long-term project of editing and publishing Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers.
Even a historian of his statue must have baulked at the prospect of this challenging task being handed to him by the King family. The offer to edit the King archive came out of the blue. Carson had not written a single word on King, but jumped at the chance. However, from the start, the role caused difficulties for Carson as he was based at Stanford and wanted to stay there. Coretta King wanted him to relocate to Atlanta, where most of the papers were located. However, a happy compromise was made.
The work has taken him well into the 21st century (Vol. 6 of the Papers was published in 2007. Clayborne Carson has not finished editing the complete set of Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers. While he has edited and published seven of the planned fourteen volumes, he has stated that the whole project will likely not be completed in his lifetime.[2]
“I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn’t received the phone call, whether I would have written something that was more mine,” Carson reflected. “The best-selling book that I’ll ever publish is the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I can hardly take credit for piecing together his words. I’ll always know that Martin Luther King will always outsell anything I write, and his writings and speeches will be more lasting. But look, if you have to be overshadowed by somebody, it might as well be Martin Luther King.”[3]
The work done by Carson on this book is to be commended because it now enables us to lift the large number of dead dogs that have been placed upon the historical reputation of Martin Luther King Jr. As Helen Halyard wrote, “King was unquestionably one of the most powerful orators of twentieth-century America and a man of great personal courage. He was able to give voice to the passionate strivings of millions of people to throw off the shackles of racial discrimination. Unlike those in today’s official civil rights leadership who seek to cash in on his memory, King was an honest man, not driven by financial gain.”[4]
From an early age, King knew he was living on borrowed time and that sooner or later his life would be taken. Perhaps that’s why he crammed so much into his short thirteen-year political career, which has filled his archive with so much documentation. King, during his short life, was reviled, spied upon, and in the end was assassinated. Over the last five decades, King’s courageous struggle for social equality has been politically undermined, and King himself has been turned into a harmless icon.
King was an essential part of what was a mass movement which fought against racial discrimination and in defence of democratic rights for both blacks and whites. However, as Helen Halyard correctly wrote, “ the leadership was characterised by a petty bourgeois class makeup and a thoroughly reformist political outlook and program. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was based on the perspective that racial equality and social and economic justice for Black people could be achieved without challenging the existence of capitalist property relations or the existing government institutions. From the Montgomery bus boycott through to the marches into Cicero, Illinois, King and the SCLC’s strategy was to mobilise nonviolent demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to pressure the government into enacting reforms.”[5]
There is no denying King’s leadership played an immense role in the struggle for civil rights, and some limited reforms were achieved, notably the enactments of 1964 and 1965, which established the legal groundwork for a new era of civil and racial equality in America. However, a lot has happened since the 1960s, and a balance sheet is in order since King’s assassination in 1963.
The limitations of the victories achieved by the movement he led are more apparent today than ever. An objective assessment is warranted to critically examine the political program that guided his movement. King rejected both Marx and Marxism from an early age, writing, “With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasised a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.”
King was not a revolutionary, but he did have socialist sympathies. He understood that for the civil rights movement to win, it had to have the collaboration of the American working class.
He recognised that under capitalism, workers were being oppressed regardless of the colour of their skin. Writing in 1958, King drew on his own working experiences, when he witnessed “economic injustice firsthand, and I realised that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences, I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”
King’s turn to the working class, which probably got him killed, would be an anathema to the current leadership of the struggle against racial and social inequality. The leadership that is responsible for the New York Times’ 1619 Project have made it clear that they want no part of Martin Luther King and his “left turn”[6]
As Tom Mackaman and Niles Niemuth point out, “the universal Enlightenment principles King fought for and defended are under vicious assault. It is striking that in the 1619 Project, the Times’ initiative to write the ‘true’ history of America as rooted in slavery and racism, King’s contribution to the fight for equality is totally ignored. This doesn’t represent a different interpretation of facts or a mere oversight, but an outright historical falsification.[7]
To his credit
Eminent historian Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, opposed and criticised the 1619 Project. In an interview for the World Socialist website, he noted that the ideals of the American Revolution and the Enlightenment played a key role in the civil rights movement and King’s own role as a political leader. “One way of looking at the founding of this country is to understand the audacity of a few hundred white male elites getting together and declaring a country—and declaring it a country based on the notion of human rights,” Carson explained. “Obviously, they were being hypocritical, but it’s also audacious. And that’s what rights are all about,” he noted. “It is the history of people saying, ‘I declare that I have the right to determine my destiny, and we collectively have the right to determine our destiny.’ That’s the history of every movement, every freedom movement in the history of the world. At some point, you have to get to that point where you have to say that, publicly, and fight for it.”[8]
2025 marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.It is perhaps remarkable still that the questions raised by the struggle of King and the civil rights movement have lost none of their urgency in the past five decades. There must be a serious discussion of this period to understand our present predicament.
As Patrick Martin says “The world we have today is not the outcome that King would have desired, nor does it represent the strivings of the millions of working people and youth—white as well as black—who joined in or were inspired by the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Those aspirations will only be carried forward through the emergence, at a far more politically conscious level, of a new mass movement of working people to challenge the capitalist system as a whole.”[9]
Notes
1. The King Centre-thekingcenter.org/what-we-do/king-library-and-archives/
Fascism] affects white and black people alike … The fight against fascism is a common fight for both of us; we approach it from two different directions and perspectives. We are the immediate victims. If they come for us in the morning, they will go for you that night. So be with us that morning, and we will be with you that night.
James Baldwin
The progress of a class toward class consciousness, that is, the building of a revolutionary party which leads the proletariat, is a complex and contradictory process. The class itself is not homogeneous. Its different sections arrive at class consciousness by different paths and at other times. The bourgeoisie participates actively in this process. Within the working class, it creates its own institutions or utilises those already existing to oppose certain strata of workers to others. Within the proletariat, several parties are active at the same time. Therefore, for the greater part of its historical journey, it has remained politically divided. The problem of the united front, which arises during specific periods most sharply, originates therein. The historical interests of the proletariat find their expression in the Communist Party when its policies are correct. The task of the Communist Party consists of winning over the majority of the proletariat, and only thus is the socialist revolution made possible. The Communist Party cannot fulfil its mission except by preserving, entirely and unconditionally, its political and organisational independence apart from all other parties and organisations within and without the working class.
Leon Trotsky-Bureaucratic Ultimatism (1932)
Socialist Workers Party member Geoff Brown is the author of the new book A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League. The ANL was launched in November 1977 to counteract the growing threat from racists and fascists who were spurred on by sections of the ruling elite who saw the fascists as a battering ram against the increasing radicalisation of the working class.
As the 2010 statement by the Socialist Equality Party stated, “The global crisis plunged Britain into a period of intense class conflict, which brought it closer to revolution than at any time since the 1926 General Strike. As a major financial centre, it was especially vulnerable to the sweeping capital movements that occurred following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. The Wilson government was forced into a series of devaluations and major spending cuts. In 1969, it brought forward the White Paper, “In Place of Strife”, to enforce legal sanctions against strikes.
The orthodox Trotskyists in the Socialist Labour League (SLL) warned that the Labour left’s refusal to lead a struggle against Wilson was paving the way for the return of a Conservative government and the imposition of even more savage measures against the working class. In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell was sacked from the shadow cabinet after delivering his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, which sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments. But Powell’s remarks were only the initial expression of a right-wing shift by the Tories, who, by 1970, had adopted a radical, free-market agenda. Based on the monetarist economic policies of Milton Friedman, they advocated an end to the “bailout” of inefficient companies, the curtailing of social provisions, and a legal offensive against wildcat strikes.[1]
It must be said from the outset that the formation of the ANL had nothing to do with Trotskyism or Leon Trotsky’s advocacy of the United Front. According to the SWP, the “ Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky conceived the idea of the united front, which unites groups that are very different, such as reformists and revolutionaries.”
What Trotsky wrote on the United Front is opposed to what the SWP did. He wrote, ‘In entering into agreements with other organisations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. If the reformists begin to put the brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we, as an independent organisation, always reserve the right to lead the struggle to its conclusion, and this without our temporary semi-allies. It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office, but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and allowing the latter to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of ‘rapprochement’ there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle….
“On the question of the united front, we see the very same passive and irresolute tendency, but this time masked by verbal irreconcilability. At the very first glance, one is hit between the eyes by the following paradox: the rightist party elements with their centrist and pacifist tendencies, who … come simultaneously to the forefront as the most irreconcilable opponents of the united front. … In contrast, those elements who have … held in the most difficult hours the position of the Third International are today in favour of the tactic of the united front. As a matter of fact, the mask of pseudo-revolutionary intransigence is now being assumed by the partisans of the dilatory and passive tactic”[2]
The SWP said it had “no secret agendas. What we say is what we do. We were running it as a united front. We couldn’t do anything that would undermine the agreement; we had a basic agreement that we were focusing on the NF.” Alongside Stalinists and reformists, the SWP had the backing of other pseudo-left parties that broadly supported the ANL, with the political scoundrel Tariq Ali writing “Hats Off to the SWP”
However, the real purpose of the SWP’s ANL United Front was to develop a pseudo-reformist alliance, aimed at deflecting a revolutionary confrontation between the working class and the British ruling elite. While from the outside the ANL was seen as an adjunct to the SWP, it was, in reality, directed by the top leadership, with SWP’s party leader, Tony Cliff, pulling the strings. Cliff was the ideological founder of the SWP, and his organisation rejected every basic tenet of Trotskyism; however, this did not stop it from using elements of Trotsky’s perspective or analysis to suit its own political objectives. Throughout his life, Cliff sought to associate the SWP with Leon Trotsky as a historical figure. But in reality, it opposed Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy and denied the viability of the Fourth International that Trotsky founded in 1938. Trotskyism was “a cul-de-sac”, Cliff wrote, while “Trotskyists suffered from the psychological need to believe in miracles.”[3]
The SWP’s perversion of the United Front tactic was also reflected in its work within the trade unions. As Paul Holborow relates, “one of the most significant considerations regarding how the ANL was established so quickly and widely as a grassroots organisation is what the SWP or the International Socialists had done industrially, particularly since the first miners’ strike in 1972 and before. Crucially, we had 22 rank-and-file papers that were an essential part of our industrial strategy for developing a rank-and-file movement that could fight independently of the trade union bureaucracy.5 This enabled us to very quickly establish sizeable groups of manual and white collar workers in their places of work—firefighters, car workers, civil servants, bus workers, dockers, teachers, engineers, council workers and many others. Perhaps the most impressive example of this was when miners’ leader Arthur Scargill and I spoke at a 200-strong delegate conference, and the following Monday, 60,000 Yorkshire miners went to work with the yellow ANL sticker on their helmets.”[4]
The purpose of the Socialist Workers Party’s rank-and-file committees, then as now, while providing tame “left-wing” criticisms of the labour and trade union bureaucracy, was to work might and main to politically block any independent movement of the working class. One problem for the pseudo-left groups is that they themselves now make up a significant faction of the trade union leadership at national, regional, and branch levels. They have been responsible for numerous betrayals and are now calling on rank-and-file members to rebel against the same bureaucracy to which they belong.
The publication of Brown’s book this year coincides with the SWP’s resurrection of the United Front campaign. According to Holborow, “When John McDonnell said last summer that we need to build an ANL-type movement, I think he was entirely right in spirit, but the context today is so different from what it was 40 years ago. Then, there was a militant rank-and-file movement. Britain was in turmoil, and the opposition to the ruling class was much more extensive and articulate. We are building in a completely different time, in the era of neoliberalism and all the ravages that this has produced for the labour movement. This makes it in many ways more necessary than ever to have an ANL-type organisation, but also more complicated.”[5] In August, McDonnell had declared, “It’s time for an Anti-Nazi League-type cultural and political campaign to resist” because “we can no longer ignore the rise of far-right politics in our society.”
This is the same McDonnell who, despite being expelled from the Labour Party by its right wing, grovelled before Starmer and begged for re-admittance to this right-wing party of big business. He wrote 11 op-eds in The Guardian, capitulating to Starmer and his right-wing allies. The SWP and its pseudo-left allies have offered him a means to resurrect his “left” reputation.
As Tony Robson and Chris Marsden point out, “There is, however, a significant difference between the 1970s and the present day. Whereas in 1977, the SWP acted with the benediction of the Labour and trade union lefts, today it speaks as the officially designated representative of the Trades Union Congress. The SWP has, over the decades, integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in several unions to complement the niche it has established within academia. It speaks today not merely as the bureaucracy’s apologist, but as its officially recognised spokesman on the left.”[6]
[1] The mass movement against the Heath government-https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-uk/32.html
[2] Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, New York and London, 1953, pp. 91–96, 127–128].
[3] Tony Cliff-Trotskyism after Trotsky-www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1999/trotism/ch03.htm
[4] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[5] The Anti Nazi League and its lessons for today-https://isj.org.uk/the-anti-nazi-league/
[6] The significance of the British Socialist Workers Party’s call for a new “left alternative”
Perhaps the most significant development in the life of both my websites has been the exponential rise in hits. For the first time in its seventeen-year history, the original blog, which began in 2008, reached fifty thousand hits in September.
Two interrelated developments account for the rise. Firstly and most significantly, the huge radicalisation taking place has produced an interest in Marxism. Secondly, the move to publicise the websites on Bluesky has not only led to a significant rise in hits but has also attracted a new audience for the websites. In the past, a slight rise in hits would have presented no problem, but this month’s increase is substantial, and if it continues, it would mean I need more writers than just myself. So this is an appeal for guest articles. The website needs to expand into other areas beyond my personal interests.
Perhaps the most important book I have read and reviewed over the last month was John Rees’s Fiery Spirits. The book is superbly written and well researched. The book breaks new ground, and already, Rees is working on what will probably be the third book in the trilogy. Like his book, The Leveller Revolution, it needs a second and possibly a third read. It is safe to say that Rees and I do not share the same political outlook, but his work as a historian should be respected, and he is taking the study of the English bourgeois revolution to a new level. I am at a loss to explain, however, why the main bourgeois media outlets virtually boycotted the book. I look forward to his latest book.
Meetings
A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League Date: 06/10/2025 to 06/10/2025 Time: 17:30 to 19:00 Venue: Online- via Zoom – Institute of Historical Research
Roundtable with editors and authors of In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956 Date 3 Dec 2025, 17:30 to 3 Dec 2025, 19:00 Venue Online- via Zoom. IHR
“When it comes to thinking about politics and race, we cannot always rely on culture as a way to remedy deeper structural questions. Having particular players or particular footballing cultural moments as a point of identification is immense. However, it cannot be a deliberate or a forced thing.”
Clive Chijioke Nwonka
“The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau [4], a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini had borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of the union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.”
Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (June 1933)
Black Arsenal was published to coincide with the start of the 2024/25 season. It is co-edited by Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor of Film, Culture, and Society at University College London (UCL), and writer Matthew Harle. It is the first of its kind. The book was remarkably 10 years in the making, with a stunning amount of research undertaken.
Asked about the origins of the book, Nwonka said, “Well, it was me thinking a lot about my own background as a person and things that had inspired me. I had started working at the London School of Economics, and I was thinking about the role of race in culture and the ways of thinking associated with it. I was being introspective with myself and realising that John Barnes was important to me in terms of being my first source of inspiration and recognition.
Then that led to the inspiration for Black Arsenal. I was at university, trying to make sense of what this concept meant and what other factors might be involved. The chapter ‘Defining Black Arsenal’ is all about the genesis of that idea. Then you start looking at history and why Black people in London gravitate mostly towards Arsenal.
Whether you are from south London or wherever, and then you realise there is a history that goes beyond Ian Wright, back to the 60s and 70s, to Brendon Batson, Paul Davis. It goes back to what Islington was in the 70s. It goes back to the JVC centre and the community work the club were doing in the 80s. All these factors were already in place before Ian Wright arrived in 1991.”[1]
The book examines the black history of Arsenal football club from a broadly academic standpoint. It also features contributions from former players such as Ian Wright and Paul Davis, as well as contributions from Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis, and personal responses from Clive Palmer, Ezra Collective, and writer Amy Lawrence.[2].
The timing of the book could not be more prescient. Since its publication in 2024, there has been a significant and distinct growth in racist and fascist forces. Recently, as Chris Marsden writes, “Unite the Kingdom demonstration in August this year was the largest far-right mobilisation in British history. Estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000, participation in London exceeded the numbers usually mobilised by anti-Muslim demagogue Tommy Robinson and extended beyond his usual support base of football hooligans and fascist thugs. This core periphery was boosted by the presence of workers and their families, including from among the most deprived layers, who have swallowed the far-right’s message blaming social distress and the collapse of essential services on migration.[3]
It should be noted from the start that Arsenal have not always had a spotless anti-racism stance. Like most businesses, it has made its fair share of mistakes regarding its stance on racism. During the refurbishment of the old Highbury North Bank in 1992, Nwonka recalls, “I remember as a kid, the first week of the Premier League season, there were all these half-rebuilt stadiums because of the Taylor report [into ground safety after the Hillsborough disaster]. Of course, no one wants to watch a building site on Sky Sports – so the idea came up that you cover it up with these illustrations of your imagined fanbase.” The original North Bank mural was an artist’s impression of a sea of white faces, with red and white scarves, which had to be replaced with a more inclusive mural.
The contributions from Paul Davis and Ian Wright are important, as they were key figures in the development of a more integrated Arsenal team. Davis paved the way for Ian Wright and later generations of players. Ian Wright was a game-changing signing from Crystal Palace. Always the rebel, he appealed to both black and white younger working-class fans. He, in turn, set the stage for Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, and Bukayo Saka.
Despite being seen as a bit of a rebel, Wright and Arsenal, for that matter, have not been shy in exploiting the commercial possibilities of such a global and multi-racial fan base. Nike and now Adidas have moved quickly in exploiting Arsenal’s multicultural teams for profit; Nwonka thinks there is a danger of such exploitation.
“With things like the Arsenal Africa shirt or the Jamaica shirt,” he says, “they have been quite open about the fact that they recognise that there was a consumer base that will find the resonance in something that pays homage to Afro-Caribbean culture. However, I have been attending the Notting Hill Carnival since I was four years old. Moreover, you would always see Arsenal shirts there all the time, rather than those of QPR, Brentford, Fulham, or Chelsea. However, what some brands often do is invest in what they imagine to be Black culture, whereas Black Arsenal, I believe, begins with Black people.”
Football has been a global game since its inception, played worldwide. However, with the advent of satellite television from companies such as Sky, the game has reached a far greater level of global integration.
As David Storey relates, “ Football has always had essential linkages connecting places. Some clubs were formed by, or as a result of, British migrants, and in some instances, this is still reflected in contemporary football. Football has always had essential linkages connecting places. Some clubs were formed by, or as a result of, British migrants, and in some instances, this is still reflected in contemporary club names or colours. Athletic Bilbao’s origins and English name are attributed to English migrant workers in the Basque Country (Ball, 2003). A similar explanation accounts for Young Boys in Switzerland, Go Ahead Eagles in the Netherlands, and The Strongest in Bolivia, among others (Goldblatt, 2007). The shirt colours worn by Juventus were reputedly borrowed from Notts County (the world’s oldest professional club) shortly after the Italian club’s formation (Lanfranchi club names or colours.
Despite this early evidence of international linkages, English football remained somewhat insular for many years (2001). Despite this early evidence of international linkages, English football remained somewhat insular for many years, with restrictions on the importation of foreign players. While the migration of professional footballers is a long-standing phenomenon, and relatively pronounced in countries such as Spain, France, and Italy, the migration of players into or out of Britain was much less apparent (Taylor, 2006). However, recent years have seen substantial numbers of footballers from other parts of the world arriving in the Premier League (and into the lower tiers in the English league system). This internationalisation has occurred alongside the increasing commercialisation of the game.”[4]
While I wholeheartedly recommend this book, it should be of interest not only to Arsenal fans but also to the broader reading public. The historical study of black footballers who played for Arsenal is a legitimate pursuit. However, much of the content of the book is dominated not by a class attitude towards racism, but by too many contributions, including Nwano’s, that see the rise of racism through racially tinted glasses.
Nwonka addressed this, saying, “Of course, I have got a small quantity of criticism from some quarters. One person, when I first posted about the Black Arsenal idea, wrote to me to say: ‘I have been going to Arsenal since the 1970s. I do not see race; I watch football.’ I thought to myself: ‘Well, I am not going to sit here and tell someone whether they should or should not see. However, have you stopped and thought that maybe the reason that you do not see race when you go to Arsenal is that Arsenal has normalised racial difference in a way that some other clubs have not? Moreover, that may be an important thing to recognise?”Nwonka’s original idea for the book was for it to be dominated by appropriate references to French poststructuralists and the postmodernist and pseudo-revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who was and is a darling of the Pseudo-Left groups. Fanon and Poststructuralists were among other pioneers of the anti-Marxist Critical race theories, which is a “body of academic writing that emerged in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which combines postmodernism and subjective idealist philosophy with historical revisionism and racial sectarianism. Although written in a different form, the book remains dominated by these anti-working-class theories that prioritise race over class
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
Given that the average age for a United Kingdom postal worker is around fifty-five, it is a fair bet that the majority of postal workers have witnessed over four decades of betrayals by the Communication Workers Union(CWU).
A small number of postal workers in their late sixties or seventies, believe it or not, are still working. They would remember the first national postal strike in 1971[1]. I raise this matter because the most pressing question facing postal workers at the moment is the issue of leadership.
Over the last five decades, postal workers have witnessed betrayal after betrayal and have seen their pay and working conditions decimated. It is time to face the facts: the CWU is nothing more than a company union that is doing the current owner, Daniel Kretinsky’s, dirty work. There is no line it will not cross to impose Amazon-style working conditions that will turn Royal Mail into an Amazon-style company with all the implications that entails.[2]
Postal workers have not been taking these attacks by the company and the union lying down. They have met these attacks head-on with every weapon at their disposal. However, it is time to face the facts: the old way of struggle has not worked. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying not to strike, but what is the new perspective that postal workers must fight for?
Leadership is an art. As the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky said, “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in the same direction: from despotism to freedom as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing “maturity” of a “people”. Still, they are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats, counterrevolutions, etc., arise.
The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals, our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own unrestrained creativeness. Leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably arises above its class and thereby becomes predisposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may “tolerate” for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid significant events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions; precisely for this reason, the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution.[3]
It is pretty clear that postal workers have been caught unawares by the unprecedented nature of the attacks on their pay and conditions. They have, in Trotsky’s words, witnessed a great historical shock. It is time to face reality square on and realise that the CWU is dead and is just waiting to be buried.
Postal workers have tolerated the CWU for a long time because they did not really have an alternative, but now they do. Firstly, they have the World Socialist Website (wsws.org). Its analysis has been second to none in terms of accuracy and perspective. It offers a new way forward for postal workers. The CWU bureaucracy knows it is in a fight to the finish, so much so that it has lashed out at the WSWS on several occasions.[4]
Postal workers need a new organisation. The way forward is the struggle to build the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee (PWRFC). Although it is small at the moment, it has the only socialist perspective to take on both the CWU bureaucracy and Royal Mail. While it must join and build this new organisation, the task facing postal workers is a political one. The philosopher Hegel was fond of saying, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk”, and this is true for postal workers today. To be blunt, postal workers do not have much time to build this leadership. Any delay in building the PWRFC will mean that, soon, there will be nothing left to defend.
Last evening I read your work on Marxism and the English Revolution for the second time. I should like to make some points about its arguments very briefly indeed.
1. If one looks at the late Conrad Russell’s corpus of works post-1975, it is possible to see that, deeply embedded within it, there is a degree of subscription to a teleological explanation of the English Civil War, e.g. about incipient support for royalism. pre-1642. I noticed this some time ago and found myself asked not to write about it.
2. One of the key economic and social changes in Anglo-Welsh society before 1640 is the strengthened position of landowners, whether peers or gentry. This goes back to the work of W.R.Emerson and helps to account for the failure of the post-1646 regimes to consolidate themselves in power. The ‘revolution’ took place against one of the key economic developments of the period.
3. As a corollary to point 2, there is good evidence to show that the tenantry of landowners out in the counties were linked not just to their landlords but also amongst and between themselves, hence the coherence of the landed interests before, during and after the 1640-1660 period.
4. One of the important themes in the Stuart realms and in continental states is the retreat from traditional bargaining methods due in measure to the fiscal and military demands of post-1618 wars. In the Stuarts’ kingdoms, these forms of consensus and complaint, bargaining and negotiation declined after 1603 and atrophied post-1625, even when the wars against France and Spain ended by 1630. Their Parliaments were only one means by which negotiations took place in these societies, pace Russell, but one can see how at county and borough levels, with corporate organisations, etc., this retreat took place and accelerated under Charles I.
I am not a Marxist, as you must know, but I enjoy debating the issues of the seventeenth century,
“That, in a Europe blood-stained by more than four years of total war, crushed under the most hideous yoke of the imperialisms, whose prisons and concentration camps are gorged with the victims of the most savage and most systematic repression, our organization has been able to hold its European assembly, to work out and define its political line of struggle, of itself constitutes the most eloquent manifestation of its vitality, its internationalist spirit, and the revolutionary ardour by which it is animated.
Fourth International statement
“The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened,’ they have begun to get somewhat rotten.”
Leon Trotsky
Michel Pablo, a renegade from Trotskyism, died at the age of eighty-four in 1996. Pablo’s betrayal of his former political principles was aptly celebrated by the Greek ruling elite at the time. When he died, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government gave him a state funeral. As the proverb says, “By your friends shall ye be known”
Hall Greenland’s biography of Pablo is the first of its kind. Alex de Jong, writing for the Pabloite International Viewpoint, believes “He’s (Pablo) finally gotten the biography he deserves.”[1]De Jong is correct because this is a politically naive account and largely absolves Pablo of his treachery. Anyone expecting anything different from a member of the Green Party is going to be sadly disappointed.
However, Greenland’s book is not without some merit, tracing Pablo’s early political life. Pablo attended the founding conference of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and took part alongside fellow Trotskyists in the anti-Nazi resistance in wartime France. The book describes how many Trotskyists during the war years were living on borrowed time; not only were they hunted by the Gestapo, but they were murdered in droves by the Stalinists.
Many writers, including Greenland, imply that despite some heroics, Trotskyists played “little or no part in the struggle to project a revolutionary defeatist line,”
But as the Marxist David North points out, “ outside the Fourth International, there was no other tendency in the workers’ movement that opposed the imperialist war! The Trotskyists were hounded and persecuted by a “popular front” of fascists, “democratic” imperialists and Stalinists precisely because they upheld the banner of revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism.
He continues, “The French Trotskyists Marc Bourhis and Pierre Gueguen were executed by the Nazis on October 22, 1941. Their comrade Jules Joffre was shot in 1942. In October 1943, the secretary of the French section, Marcel Hic, was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Buchenwald and then to Dora, where he was murdered. Dozens of other French Trotskyists were arrested and also perished in the Nazi death camps. Despite the repression, the Trotskyist PCI published, starting in August 1940, seventy-three clandestine issues of its newspaper, La Verité, whose circulation was 15,000 copies.”[2]
Despite describing how the Stalinists murdered Trotskyists at will Greenland follows in the footsteps of every Stalinist, Pabloite and related middle-class radical organizations, and the intellectually corrupt academic milieu of pseudo-leftists who in the words of North “continue to ignore, deprecate and deny the overwhelming evidence that the penetration of the US Socialist Workers Party SWP by GPU agents played a critical role in the assassination of Trotsky. The role of Sylvia Callen (a.k.a. Sylvia Franklin, Sylvia Caldwell, Sylvia Doxsee), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon, as a GPU spy has been conclusively established. The same is true for Robert Sheldon Harte.”[3]
There are many problems with this book. The main one being is Greenland’s complete lack of understanding of the origins and nature of Pablo’s opportunism and subsequent betrayals caused by this opportunism. It is impossible to go into any great detail of Pabloite opportunism. For anyone interested, David North’s The Heritage We Defend is the best starting point.
As North points out in his book, the origins of Pablo’s opportunism began over the debate over the class nature of Yugoslavia and the Eastern European buffer states had become transformed, under the pressure of alien class forces, into a political platform for sweeping opportunist revisions of the basic Trotskyist program and its historical perspective. Pablo was the living embodiment of Trotsky’s sayings, “Without correct theory, there cannot be correct politics or more precisely, ‘every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis.”
North writes, “ The theories advanced by Pablo of ‘generations of deformed workers’ states” and “war-revolution” articulated the pessimism and demoralisation of broad layers of the Fourth International beneath the impact of unfavourable objective conditions. The political conceptions which were to become known as Pabloism emerged as an adaptation to the restabilization of capitalism, on the one hand, and to the apparent strengthening of the Stalinist bureaucracy, on the other.
Refracted through the political prism of the Cold War, the objective situation appeared to be dominated by the global conflict between the imperialist forces, spearheaded by the United States, and the Soviet Union and those labour and national revolutionary movements dominated by Stalinism. The real underlying conflict between the world bourgeoisie and the international proletariat—of which the Cold War was only a partial and distorted manifestation—receded from the political consciousness of those within the Fourth International who were reacting impressionistically to world events.[4]
Pablo’s capitulation to hostile class forces was not a pretty one to watch and had disastrous consequences for the working class. After he rejected revolutionary politics, Pablo, up to his death, was a supporter of ecology movements and women’s liberation. Along with his other renegades from Trotskyism, Ernest Mandel Pablo, he advocated not the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but that workers should undertake a form of Self-Management to counteract capitalism’s attacks on them.
Pablo advocated ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’. He utilised his friendship with the Algerian bourgeois nationalists to put this experiment into practice. As Peter Schwarz writes, “Pablo himself and other leading French Pabloites placed themselves unconditionally at the service of the Algerian Liberation Front (FLN), and took over organisational responsibilities, such as the printing of illegal newspapers, fake banknotes and counterfeit passports. They even set up a weapons factory in Morocco. After the victory of the FLN over the French colonial regime, Pablo entered into the service of the Algerian government. As special advisor to the head of state, Ben Bella, Pablo was responsible for the introduction in Algerian factories of the forms of “workers’ self-management” first initiated in post-war Yugoslavia.”[5]
In his book Self-management in the struggle for socialism, Pablo explains, “In the economic sphere, the purpose of the plan is to determine the general conditions under which the self-managed enterprises can act and coordinate their efforts for the ultimate interests of society as a whole. We use the term social rather than economic plan to stress the fact that the plan seeks the balanced overall evolution of the society towards socialism, and that this affects the determination of so-called economic aims; the real aim of the plan is to satisfy the real social needs of the working people and citizens, with decisions made democratically from the bottom up and vice-versa, in a process of interaction which is constantly readjusting the objectives sought, even while the plan is being executed.[6]
As the above quote shows, Pablo’s self-management plan would be introduced peacefully and with the full cooperation of the capitalists; at no stage did Pablo advocate, let alone attempt, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
Although Greenland’s book is the first and only biography of Pablo, it should not be the last. It is incumbent on the Trotskyist movement to write its biography of this renegade from Trotskyism to train and arm future revolutionaries as to the nature of Pablo’s opportunism and betrayals.
[1] The Revolutionary Life and Times of Michel Pablo-internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8471
[2] The Fourth International in World War II-The Heritage we Defend-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/heritage/07.html
[3] The place of Security and the Fourth International in the history of the Trotskyist movement-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/08/14/dujg-a14.html
[4] The Nature of Pabloite Opportunism-The Heritage We Defend
[5] The politics of opportunism: the “radical left” in France-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/05/lft4-m22.html
[6] Self-management in the struggle for socialism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/1972/selfman/main.htm
A Trumpet of Sedition 