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

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

Who was Mikhail Basmanov?

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

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

David North and the Stalinist falsification of Trotskyism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why 1972?

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

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

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

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

The method of the Stalinist school of falsification

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shadow of the Moscow Trials

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

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

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

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

What Basmanov cannot explain

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

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

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

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

A surprisingly useful primary source

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

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

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

History’s verdict

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

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

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

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

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

The new introduction

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

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

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

Why republish it now?

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

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

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

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

A museum piece, but an instructive one

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

Primary text

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

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

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

Trotsky and the Left Opposition

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

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

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

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

Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.

Stalinism and the historical struggle over Trotskyism

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

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

Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin. 1937.

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

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

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

Kelly’s argument

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

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

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

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

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

The missing question: the unions’ programme

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

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

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

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

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

The verdict of history

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

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

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

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

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

From Trade Unions and Socialist Politics to mobilisation theory

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

Primary text

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

Classical Marxist sources

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly’s later work on trade unions and industrial relations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related works

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

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

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

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

Contemporary reviews

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

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

Published by Verso on 27 October 2026, Ewan Gibbs’s An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class sets itself an important historical and political task. Verso describes it as a social history of the British working class since 1945, extending “from the picket lines of the Miners’ Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today”. Through first-hand testimony, the book follows the transformation of a class once concentrated in mines, shipyards, and other centres of heavy industry into one dispersed across call centres, warehouses, and the gig economy. Its culminating question is explicitly political: “who now speaks for labour?”

That question could hardly be more urgent. The old organisations that claimed for generations to represent the working class have undergone a protracted collapse. The Labour Party has moved ever further from the reformist programme it was historically identified with, while the trade-union bureaucracy increasingly functions as an apparatus for containing workers’ struggles. The destruction of manufacturing employment, the privatisation of state industries, the erosion of social provision and the growth of precarious employment have transformed the social landscape in which millions live.

Gibbs brings considerable knowledge to this subject. He is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and describes his research interests as encompassing energy, industry, work and protest. His earlier book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland, examined the decline of deep coal mining in Scotland and its consequences for work, communities, memory, class and nationhood. His subsequent research has extended into the political economy of energy and the problems associated with industrial transition.

The empirical virtues of this work should not be dismissed. Verso stresses the prominence Gibbs gives to first-hand accounts, while Rhian E. Jones praises the book specifically for “letting its subjects speak for themselves”. The recollections of miners, engineers and workers from communities devastated by industrial closure constitute important historical evidence. Such testimony preserves experiences that would otherwise be submerged beneath official statistics and the complacent narratives of politicians who have treated deindustrialisation as the unavoidable price of economic modernisation.

But the preservation of experience does not by itself provide a historical explanation. History must establish the relationship between experience and the social forces that produced it. It must explain not merely what happened, but why, which political forces intervened, what programmes they advanced, and what alternatives existed. It is precisely here that the concept of the “unmaking” of the British working class raises fundamental problems.

From the “making” to the “unmaking” of the working class

The title consciously echoes E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. The intellectual ancestry of the argument is made especially clear by Gibbs’s 2019 essay, “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis”. There he defined the “unmaking” primarily through the atrophy of what he called “Labourism”: the political and institutional world centred on organised labour and its attachment to the Labour Party. He linked this process to deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, the demise of collective action, and the political demoralisation visible in former industrial areas.

This is an important starting point because the decline of “Labourism” is not identical to the disappearance of the working class. The conflation of the two contains the central theoretical difficulty. The working class is not defined by living in a mining village, wearing overalls, possessing a particular regional accent or belonging to a trade union. It is defined fundamentally by its relationship to the means of production. Workers who do not own significant productive property must sell their labour power to live. Changes in technology, occupation and geography can profoundly alter the forms through which class consciousness develops without abolishing the underlying class relation.

Indeed, Verso’s own description of An Injury to All illustrates the contradiction. It describes a class once “forged in mines and shipyards” becoming one spread across call centres and gig-economy applications. But this is not, strictly speaking, the disappearance of the working class. It is a transformation in the occupational structure and geographical concentration of wage labour. What has been shattered is something different: an historically specific form of working-class organisation and consciousness that grew alongside nationally regulated capitalism and became politically subordinated to the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy.

The distinction is decisive. If the decline of mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking and large-scale manufacturing automatically meant the decline of the working class, then the pessimistic conclusions associated with post-industrial sociology might follow. But if capitalist restructuring destroyed certain concentrations of workers while simultaneously producing new ones, the historical problem changes entirely. We are no longer asking why the working class disappeared. We are asking why organisations created in its name proved incapable of responding progressively to this transformation.

The exhaustion of national reformism

The postwar settlement in Britain emerged from definite international historical conditions. The Depression, fascism, and the Second World War had radicalised workers’ masses internationally. Britain emerged from the war economically weakened and increasingly subordinate to the United States. At the same time, the long postwar economic expansion provided the resources to make significant social concessions while preserving capitalist property relations.

Nationalisation, the National Health Service, expanded welfare provision, council housing, and collective bargaining did not abolish capitalism. They represented concessions made within it under the immense pressure of the working class. This was the environment within which Labourism acquired its postwar authority. The Labour Party claimed that Parliament could gradually transform capitalism while trade unions negotiated improvements within the existing economic order. The bureaucracy’s privileged position depended on its ability to mediate between workers and employers.

The breakdown of the postwar economic order increasingly undermined this arrangement’s foundations. The growing internationalisation of production brought national industries directly into competition within a globally organised system of production and finance. British capitalism responded by demanding wage restraint, rationalisation, closures, deregulation and attacks upon social spending. The Labour and trade-union bureaucracy confronted a historical choice. Either the working class had to challenge capitalist property relations, or its organisations had to accept British capitalism’s demands. They chose the second course.

This is the history that the language of “unmaking” threatens to obscure. Workers did not wake up one morning and decide that solidarity had become unfashionable. Collective institutions did not simply evaporate under the influence of individualism or suburbanisation. Nor was Thatcherism merely the ideological expression of an inexplicable change in national “structures of feeling”. A sustained political offensive targeted the working class, and the organisations through which workers traditionally fought increasingly became mechanisms for suppressing resistance. From the standpoint of Marxism, therefore, Thatcherism cannot be understood independently of the crisis of Labourism. The strength of the Conservative offensive ultimately depended on the political paralysis its existing leadership imposed on the working class.

The miners’ strike and the decisive historical defeat

The 1984-85 miners’ strike occupies an unavoidable position in any account of this transformation. Verso foregrounds the miners’ struggle in An Injury to All, describing its narrative as extending from the miners’ picket lines to contemporary Amazon warehouses. The strike represented a historic confrontation between the working class and the Thatcher government. The government understood that the miners represented far more than one occupational group. Their defeat would alter class relations throughout Britain.

But the decisive question is therefore not simply why the mines subsequently closed. It is why the miners were defeated. An explanation centred upon geographical restructuring or the weakening of industrial solidarities reverses cause and effect. The demoralisation that followed the destruction of the coalfields cannot adequately explain a defeat that helped produce that demoralisation.

Consequently, labour movement leadership becomes indispensable. The miners needed to mobilise the working class as a whole. Instead, their struggle remained confined to an industrial dispute, while the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy opposed any political mobilisation that could threaten the Thatcher government. The subsequent devastation of the coalfields was enormous. Jobs disappeared, communities lost their economic foundations, and decades of accumulated collective experience came under sustained pressure. But these consequences must be understood historically as the aftermath of a major political defeat.

Gibbs’s 2019 essay provides valuable evidence of the bitterness that survived in former coalfield constituencies. Discussing Bolsover, he noted hostile memories of the miners’ strike and how electoral allegiances subsequently fractured. He placed this within a broader trajectory of deindustrialisation, demobilisation, and declining attachment to the labour movement.  But hostility towards the former institutions of the labour movement cannot be treated merely as evidence of weakening working-class identity. It must also be understood as the distorted product of decades of bitter political experience.

Workers repeatedly mobilised through organisations that claimed to represent them, only to discover that those organisations refused to wage a struggle against the social order responsible for declining living standards and industrial destruction. The resulting alienation did not mean class antagonism had disappeared. It showed Labourism’s growing inability to contain that antagonism within its traditional political forms.

Hobsbawm, Marxism Today and the retreat from the working class

The theoretical lineage behind the concept of “unmaking” therefore deserves closer examination. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous intervention, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?”, offered an influential formulation of the claim that the traditional working class was losing the social weight socialist politics had supposedly depended on. Such arguments subsequently became central to the Eurocommunist current associated with Marxism Today.

The consequences were far-reaching. Rather than examining the betrayals the working class suffered and the need to build an alternative revolutionary leadership, this tendency increasingly treated changes in capitalism’s occupational composition as evidence that class politics itself had to be supplemented or replaced by broader democratic politics organised around diverse social constituencies.

The political development eventually contributed to an intellectual climate in which accommodation to the market could be presented as realism. What had begun as an argument about changes within the working class became an argument for abandoning the working class as the central revolutionary agency of socialist politics.

It is significant in this respect that Gibbs opened his 2019 essay with Hall’s formulation from “Gramsci and Us”: “You lose because you lose because you lose.” The phrase encapsulates the danger of converting political defeats into sociological inevitabilities. Workers lose. Industrial communities decline. Labour loyalties disintegrate. Nationalism or right-wing populism fills the vacuum. History becomes an accumulation of defeats whose explanation resides increasingly in transformed identities, cultures and geographies. But Marxism must ask a different question: why did they lose?

Who led these struggles? What political programme did that leadership defend? What alternatives were suppressed? Why did enormous demonstrations of working-class militancy repeatedly terminate in retreats brokered by organisations that claimed to represent the workers? Once those questions are posed, the history of postwar Britain assumes a profoundly different shape.

The working class was transformed, not abolished.

The central empirical fact confronting the “unmaking” thesis is that capitalism has not transcended wage labour. It has enormously extended it. The old industrial landscape has certainly disappeared in many areas. The pit head, shipyard and steelworks that once dominated entire towns have closed. Millions no longer work in enterprises around which dense occupational cultures developed over generations. But capitalism replaced them with other forms of proletarian labour.

Hospitals, schools, logistics depots, supermarkets, telecommunications networks, warehouses, call centres and digital platforms depend upon vast numbers of wage workers. Privatisation has transferred former public services into corporate hands while retaining workers whose labour remains socially indispensable. The important historical transition, therefore, is not from a working-class society to a post-working-class society. It is from one configuration of the working class to another.

The social character of production has meanwhile become vastly more international. A worker employed in a warehouse or logistics depot in Britain participates in production and distribution systems that extend across continents. Components, data, finance and commodities cross national borders continuously. Capital already organises production internationally. Labour remains politically divided by national institutions. This contradiction is crucial because it suggests that nationally based Labourism cannot accommodate it. The development of globalised production did not destroy the material basis for international working-class solidarity. It strengthened it.

The turn towards nationalism

Here the Scottish dimension of Gibbs’s political outlook becomes especially revealing. In his 2019 New Socialist essay, he argued that Labour’s future in Scotland required breaking with its commitment to the unitary British state. He described nationalism as having “displaced Labourism” in Scotland, supported recognition of the right to another independence referendum and advocated pressure upon the Scottish government to defy Westminster. He suggested that such confrontation could be accompanied by civil disobedience. An important democratic question concerns opposition to coercive attempts to suppress national aspirations. But that does not settle nationalism’s class character or establish it as a progressive alternative to Labourism. The Marxist starting point must be the independent interests of the working class.

A worker in Glasgow does not have fundamentally antagonistic social interests to a worker in Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff or London. They confront the same capitalist ownership structures, financial institutions, and, increasingly, the same multinational corporations. Nationalism translates capitalism-generated social grievances into political demands organised around national territory. It thereby offers another national programme precisely when capitalist development has made economic life more internationally integrated than ever before. The answer to the exhaustion of British national reformism therefore cannot be Scottish national reformism.

Changing the constitutional boundaries within which capitalist property relations operate does not abolish those relations. Neither does exchanging administration from Westminster for administration from Edinburgh resolve the contradictions between wage labour and capital. If the decisive historical development since the 1970s has been the internationalisation of capitalist production, the socialist response cannot consist of creating smaller national frameworks within which workers continue competing for investment. It must politically unify workers across national boundaries against globally organised capital.

Grangemouth and the limits of “just transition”

Gibbs’s recent work on Grangemouth provides a contemporary expression of these issues. His University of Glasgow profile describes his research into energy and industrial transition and records his involvement in work on the Grangemouth refinery closure. His publications include “Workers’ perspectives on an unjust transition: place, history, and workplace closure at Grangemouth oil refinery, Scotland”, “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance” and, in 2026, “Scotland’s unjust transition: the view from Grangemouth”. Grangemouth sharply frames the conflict between social need and private ownership.

The fundamental question is not whether workers should be consulted more effectively about industrial transition. It is who controls the productive resources upon which entire communities depend. Workers possess enormous accumulated technical knowledge. Yet under capitalist ownership, the continued operation or closure of productive facilities ultimately depends on profitability. Decisions affecting thousands of lives appear as the private prerogative of corporations and investors. A genuinely rational transition to sustainable energy production would begin from entirely different premises. Society would determine energy investment according to environmental need and human welfare rather than private profit. Workers displaced from environmentally damaging production would be guaranteed decent employment, training and living standards as productive resources were redirected. But such planning immediately raises the property question. Who owns the energy industry? Who controls investment? Who determines whether a refinery, power station or industrial plant operates? Who decides what replaces it?

These are class questions rather than merely problems of governance. A socialist programme would therefore fight to place major energy corporations and strategic industries under public ownership and democratic workers’ control as part of an internationally coordinated transformation of production.

“Who speaks for labour?”

We can now return to the question Verso asks in An Injury to All: “who now speaks for labour?” The wording itself can mislead. The fundamental problem confronting workers is not discovering somebody willing to “speak for” them. Labour politicians have spoken in workers’ names for generations. Trade-union officials do so every day. The real issue is political leadership. A class becomes an independent political force only when it understands its historical interests and develops organisations capable of fighting for them. No amount of sociological reconstruction can substitute for this task.

The old labour organisations developed within the nation-state framework. Their bureaucracy mediated between working people and national capital. When capitalist production became globally integrated, these organisations did not become internationalist. Instead, they defended the national economy more explicitly. The consequences followed inexorably. If British companies had to become “competitive”, wages and conditions had to be restrained. If investment might move elsewhere, workers had to accept concessions. When factories faced closure, union leaders sought agreements to persuade corporations that production would remain profitable.

The worker thereby ceased to be represented as a member of an international class and instead became a cost on the balance sheet of “our” national economy. This transformation cannot be understood merely as weakened solidarity. It was the political bankruptcy of nationalism and reformism under conditions of globally organised capitalism.

Not the unmaking of the working class, but the collapse of Labourism

This is ultimately the conceptual problem contained in the title An Injury to All. What disappeared was real and historically significant. Mining communities were devastated. Manufacturing towns were hollowed out. Trade-union membership declined. Labour loyalties weakened. Institutions through which generations of workers had expressed a collective identity deteriorated.

But none of this established that the working class ceased to exist. What collapsed was the identification of working-class politics with a particular set of national institutions. This distinction completely changes the historical perspective. If the working class has been “unmade”, socialist politics becomes an exercise in assembling coalitions among fragmented identities, regions and social movements. Politics moves from class towards culture, nationality and electoral sociology.

If Labourism has been exhausted while the working class itself has been objectively enlarged and internationally integrated, an entirely different conclusion follows. The problem becomes one of revolutionary leadership. The central lesson of the last half century is not that workers possessed too much belief in class struggle. Rather, enormous manifestations of class struggle remained politically subordinated to organisations committed to defending capitalism. The task therefore cannot be to recreate the labour movement of the 1950s.

Nor should socialists romanticise the industrial communities that have disappeared. Their solidarity and collective traditions represented tremendous achievements, but national reformism, trade-union bureaucracy, and, in important areas, Stalinism also dominated their political life. The future cannot be built by reconstructing the past’s institutional arrangements.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Gibbs’s title is therefore ironic. “An injury to one is an injury to all” contains a conception far more radical than nostalgia for industrial Britain’s vanished institutions. It expresses the elementary internationalist truth that workers share fundamental interests arising from their common relationship to capital. Today that proposition possesses an objective material foundation on an unprecedented scale.

The worker in a British warehouse is integrated into the same international production and distribution processes as workers throughout Europe, Asia and North America. The nurse confronting deteriorating public services, the teacher facing declining real incomes, the delivery worker controlled through an application and the engineer employed by a multinational corporation occupy different workplaces but confront the same fundamental relationship between labour and capital.

Capitalism has globalised production while preserving private ownership and the nation-state system. It has created the material foundations for international working-class unity while continuously mobilising nationalism to prevent that unity from assuming conscious political form. That contradiction, rather than the disappearance of the proletariat, defines the present historical period. Gibbs has accumulated valuable material concerning the experience and memory of deindustrialisation. His previous work demonstrates sustained engagement with the workers and communities most immediately affected by industrial restructuring. His research encompasses precisely the terrain upon which some of the central class conflicts of modern Britain have unfolded. But An Injury to All cannot ultimately be resolved through oral history, electoral sociology, or the politics of national reconstruction. “Who speaks for labour?” is the wrong question if it means searching among the remains of Labourism for another institutional representative. The working class must speak for itself.

Doing so requires a political movement independent of the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy, hostile to every attempt to divide workers by nationality, and consciously based on the international character of modern capitalist production. The British working class was not “unmade”. A historically specific labour movement based upon national reformism has undergone a profound degeneration and collapse. The distinction is not semantic. It determines whether the defeats of the past half century are seen as evidence of the disappearance of working-class politics or as historical experiences from which a new socialist movement must draw lessons.

The mines closed. Shipyards disappeared. Council estates were sold. The institutions associated with Labourism decayed. But labour did not disappear. Capital could not survive for a single day without it. The historical question is therefore not how to reconstruct the Britain of the postwar settlement. It is how the enormously expanded and internationally interconnected working class can transform itself from an objective social force into a conscious political force. In that sense the old slogan remains entirely contemporary: an injury to one is an injury to all. But taking those words seriously means following them beyond Labourism and nationalism to their necessary political conclusion: the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism.

Bibliography

Gibbs, Ewan. An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. London: Verso, 2026. [versobooks.com]

Gibbs, Ewan. Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland. London: University of London Press, 2021. [gla.ac.uk]

Gibbs, Ewan. “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis.” New Socialist, 19 December 2019. [newsocialist.org.uk]

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

Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today, June 1987. Gibbs uses Hall’s “You lose because you lose because you lose” as the epigraph to his 2019 essay. [newsocialist.org.uk]

Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: New Left Books, 1977.

Shibe, Riyoko and Ewan Gibbs. “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance.” Journal of the British Academy, 13 (1), 2025. [gla.ac.uk]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Britain: 20 years since the year-long miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2004. This is particularly relevant to your argument because it links the miners’ defeat to the roles of Labour and the TUC and connects the exhaustion of national reformism to the globalisation of production. [wsws.org], [wsws.org]

Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Forty years since the British miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2024. The article places the 1984-85 struggle within the international shift toward deregulation, global investment, and internationalised production, and argues that the reformist and Stalinist organisations’ betrayals were decisive in this period’s defeats. [wsws.org]

Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism, claims to equip a new generation to understand communism’s origins, its appeal to millions, and its descent into disastrous bureaucratic regimes. This is no antiquarian exercise: Mason presents the book as a political intervention for a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced by something better. His answer is unequivocal: “not like this”.

That declared purpose makes one aspect of Reds: A Global History of Communism especially revealing: Leon Trotsky’s absence from its public-facing genealogy of communism. This point must be made carefully. No evidence currently available shows who chose the figures on the book’s cover or in its promotional material, let alone that Paul Mason personally instructed his publisher to exclude Trotsky. Any such claim would go beyond the evidence. However, the omission still has political significance worth examining. The question is not what a designer or marketing department had in mind, but why Leon Trotsky—and, above all, the historical movement associated with his name—poses such profound difficulties for any narrative that presents twentieth-century communism as a broadly continuous movement from revolutionary aspirations to totalitarian dictatorship.

What happens when we restore Leon Trotsky to his proper place in this history? The supposedly self-evident progression from the Russian Revolution to Stalinism immediately becomes a matter of political dispute. We must reckon with the Left Opposition and the struggle over the nationalist doctrine of “socialism in one country”. We must also explain the political extermination of the generation associated with the October Revolution, the Moscow Trials and the Great Terror, the formation of the Fourth International, and, ultimately, Trotsky’s assassination in 1940. Above all, we must address the historical claim made by Leon Trotsky and the movement he founded: Stalinism was not the inevitable fulfilment of Marxism and Bolshevism, but a bureaucratic reaction against the international socialist programme on which the October Revolution was based. That is no minor historiographical disagreement. It goes to the heart of Reds: A Global History of Communism.

From revolution to “totalitarian nightmare”

The book’s declared scope could scarcely be broader. Paul Mason deliberately begins in antiquity rather than in 1917, tracing communal and egalitarian movements through ancient and medieval society, the French Revolution, nineteenth-century anti-capitalist movements, and twentieth-century revolutionary upheavals. He says the book examines how Vladimir Lenin’s movement defeated its ideological rivals because, “for a time”, it seemed to work, before turning to what Paul Mason describes as the transformation of the twentieth-century communist experiment into a “totalitarian nightmare”.

The American promotional description is scarcely less explicit. It promises to trace communism’s development from a political idea to a mass movement and, ultimately, to totalitarian regimes. The story acknowledges the genuine heroism of workers and peasants resisting exploitation, but ultimately foregrounds repression, famine, and authoritarian rule. At a time when capitalism appears increasingly unstable and communist ideas may therefore attract renewed interest, the book is marketed as a warning against the resurgence of an “authoritarian left” and as an appeal for an anti-capitalism grounded in “universal human values”.

There is nothing objectionable in documenting the immense crimes committed by Stalinist and Maoist regimes. Marxists have no political interest in concealing them. Indeed, the strongest Marxist indictment of Stalinism was written while the liberal intelligentsia and substantial sections of the bourgeois political establishment were accommodating themselves to the Soviet bureaucracy. The issue is therefore not whether Stalinist repression should be exposed. It is how Stalinism itself is explained.

Did the bureaucratic dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin arise organically from Marxism and the October Revolution? Was Stalinism essentially Leninism carried through to its logical conclusion? Or did a bureaucratic caste emerge under historically specific conditions of economic backwardness, revolutionary isolation, exhaustion and international defeat, eventually destroying the Marxist leadership through which the working class had taken power? Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition make it impossible to evade this question.

The historical problem of Trotsky

Leon Trotsky matters not because socialists require an alternative personality cult with which to counter that surrounding Joseph Stalin. Nor can the historical argument be reduced to the claim that everything done under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky was democratic and everything done afterwards was bureaucratic. Such an account would collapse under serious historical examination. The Bolsheviks confronted civil war, foreign military intervention, famine and the economic disintegration of an already backward society. During that struggle, their government employed coercive measures that remain the subject of legitimate historical and political controversy.

But this makes the subsequent conflict within the Soviet state even more important. For whatever judgement one reaches concerning Bolshevik policies during the Civil War, the Soviet Union of the late 1930s was not simply the political regime of 1917 grown older. An immense transformation had taken place. Bureaucracy had gutted the revolutionary party. Oppositionists had been expelled, imprisoned and killed. Many of the best-known figures associated with the October insurrection were accused of fantastic conspiracies, subjected to show trials and executed. The revolutionary history of the Soviet Union itself was systematically rewritten. The fundamental question therefore becomes: what social and political processes produced this transformation?

Leon Trotsky’s answer was developed over years of political struggle and reached its most systematic expression in The Revolution Betrayed. Russia’s backwardness, compounded by economic devastation and, above all, the Soviet state’s isolation after revolutions failed elsewhere, created conditions in which an administrative bureaucracy gained an increasingly privileged social position. That bureaucracy did not openly abandon the property relations established by October. Instead, it progressively monopolised political power while transforming Marxism into an ideological justification for its own interests.

The “socialism in one country” programme gave this bureaucracy its nationalist outlook. Against it, Leon Trotsky defended the conception that animated the October Revolution itself: that victory in Russia could not be seen as a nationally self-sufficient socialist development, but as the opening stage of the international socialist revolution. This political conflict cannot be removed from the history of communism without fundamentally changing that history’s meaning.

Why the omission matters

That brings us back to the cover and promotional presentation surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. The argument should not be reduced to alleging an editorial conspiracy for which there is no evidence. Covers are marketing objects, and the personalities selected for them may reflect numerous editorial, aesthetic and commercial considerations. But historical representation is never entirely innocent, especially when the book is presented not merely as a history of communism but as an intervention in contemporary arguments over whether capitalism can and should be transcended.

Trotsky’s absence therefore matters less for explaining why someone left him off the cover than for asking what happens to history once he disappears. Trotsky does not fit easily into a straightforward genealogy in which revolutionary communism develops progressively into Stalinist dictatorship. His presence immediately introduces another history: the Left Opposition’s struggle against the emerging Soviet bureaucracy, the conflict between permanent revolution and “socialism in one country”, the expulsion and persecution of oppositionists, the Moscow Trials, the founding of the Fourth International, and Trotsky’s eventual assassination in 1940. The road from October to Stalin suddenly ceases to appear inevitable.

Put Trotsky back into the picture and Stalinism itself becomes a historical problem requiring explanation. If Stalin merely completed what Lenin and the Bolsheviks had begun, why was it necessary to politically suppress the Left Opposition and eventually destroy so much of the generation associated with the October Revolution? Why did Stalinism have to rewrite the history of 1917, erase political opponents from the revolutionary record and transform “socialism in one country” into communist orthodoxy? Whatever conclusions one reaches about these questions, their existence disrupts any seamless identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism.

This is precisely why the representation matters. Trotsky’s significance does not lie in portraying him as an infallible democratic alternative to Stalin. Rather, it lies in the historical fact that Stalinism faced an organised opposition that claimed the legacy of revolutionary Marxism and socialist internationalism. The dispute, then, was not between communism and its liberal critics, but within the revolutionary movement itself, over the meaning and future of October.

The missing face consequently represents something much larger than a publishing decision. It symbolises a missing historical possibility. Restore Trotsky and the Left Opposition to the picture, and twentieth-century communism no longer appears as a single road running inexorably from revolution to dictatorship. It becomes a history of competing programmes, social forces and political struggles whose outcome was fought over, not predetermined. That is the history a new generation contemplating alternatives to capitalism.

Trotsky complicates the picture.

Return Leon Trotsky to the centre of twentieth-century communist history, and the reader encounters not one communist tradition marching inexorably towards dictatorship, but an enormous, ferocious struggle over what communism was to become. Instead of a simple chronological sequence ending in the gulag, one encounters competing programmes, different social interests and irreconcilable international strategies.

Joseph Stalin then ceases to appear merely as the next name in a succession beginning with Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s decision to destroy the political tendency represented by Leon Trotsky requires explanation. Why was the Left Opposition suppressed? Why did “socialism in one country” have to defeat the internationalist perspective of permanent revolution? Why did so many leaders associated with October disappear into prisons, executions and exile? Why was the historical record of 1917 itself repeatedly falsified?

Whatever one’s ultimate judgement of Leon Trotsky’s answers, these questions cannot be dismissed without impoverishing history. This is especially true because Paul Mason presents Reds: A Global History of Communism as having an explicitly contemporary purpose. His own description links the history of the twentieth-century communist experience with present political questions surrounding China, Russia, the crisis of Western democracy, climate change and what he calls new forms of “techno-egalitarianism”. Paul Mason says that, as China and Russia challenge the democracies and a new “authoritarian left” attempts to displace social democracy, liberalism and anarchism, his book should be understood not only as history but as “a political intervention”. The history is therefore inseparable from the politics.

From revolutionary politics to radical social democracy

This gives Paul Mason’s own political evolution particular significance. He approaches Marxism neither as a conventional Cold War liberal nor as a conservative historian who has always regarded socialism with hostility. He travelled politically from the revolutionary left towards what he has described as radical social democracy. He now frames the central contemporary political division increasingly as democracy versus authoritarianism, while supporting the defence of the Western democratic order against Russia and China.

The institutional evolution accompanying this change is noteworthy. The promotional material for an October 2026 appearance identifies Paul Mason as a writer, broadcaster and “political strategist”, and as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. This does not prove anyone dictated the contents of Reds: A Global History of Communism, nor is such an argument necessary. The point is political rather than conspiratorial. The framework through which Paul Mason now examines the twentieth century has shifted profoundly from that of revolutionary Marxism.

That helps explain the extraordinary contemporary burden this history bears. The book is concerned not simply with why communist regimes emerged, developed bureaucratic dictatorships and ultimately collapsed or transformed themselves. Its lessons directly address the political choices people face today. Paul Mason acknowledges that Western democracies are stagnating, that an impending climate disaster requires radical economic solutions, and that millions elsewhere may see China’s authoritarian, state-led model as a viable alternative. Under these conditions, he says the history of communism must warn a new generation against repeating the twentieth century.

But this formulation itself raises the decisive question: What exactly would count as repeating the twentieth century? Would it mean overthrowing capitalism, building a revolutionary workers’ party, or establishing working-class political power? Or would it mean repeating Stalinism’s nationalist and bureaucratic repudiation of socialist internationalism? These are not remotely the same propositions.

Ethics against historical materialism

Paul Mason’s answer increasingly rests upon an ethical conception of socialism. The alternative to authoritarianism must be grounded in democracy and universal human values. The attraction is obvious. Against dictatorship, democracy; against brutality, humanity; against lies, truth. But moral categories cannot substitute for an analysis of the social forces that created the historical phenomena under discussion.

Marxism does not oppose democracy or human emancipation. Its distinctive contribution is to ask under what material conditions democracy exists, what classes exercise power, what social relationships sustain political institutions, and why political forms change. Without that approach, Stalin becomes primarily the representative of a disastrous political idea rather than the head of a definite bureaucratic social formation emerging under historically identifiable circumstances.

There is a further difficulty. If communism can be traced backwards through millennia as an essentially timeless desire for equality and communal existence, it becomes possible to detach it from the specific contradictions of capitalist society that produced modern Marxism. Paul Mason explicitly argues that the desire to live without hierarchy and property is deeply rooted in human nature and begins his story in antiquity rather than in 1917.

At first, this sounds like an extraordinarily generous concession to communism. Instead of communist aspirations being unnatural, they become almost universal. But the price is considerable. Communism ceases to be understood primarily as the political programme associated with a historically specific class relationship generated by capitalism itself and instead becomes an ancient human aspiration that repeatedly assumes different forms.

The specificity of Marxism is thereby weakened. Marx did not derive communism from an abstract human desire for fairness. His critique began with definite material relations of production and with the contradictions of capitalist development. The modern working class occupied a unique position not because workers were morally purer than everybody else, but because capitalist production created a social class compelled to sell its labour power while simultaneously concentrating it within increasingly socialised processes of production. Once communism is removed from that material framework, its recurrent defeats can take on the appearance of an eternal human tragedy: noble aspirations repeatedly descending into coercion when someone tries to implement them.

International revolution or socialism in one country

Here the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin assumes its full significance. Its leaders did not conceive the October Revolution as the beginning of a self-contained Russian road to socialism. Russia’s enormous economic backwardness made such a conception particularly implausible. The Bolsheviks understood their seizure of power as part of an international revolutionary crisis generated by the First World War. They expected the Russian Revolution to spark revolutionary struggles abroad, especially in Europe.

The isolation of the Soviet state was therefore not a minor complication. It transformed the conditions under which the revolutionary government had to develop. Defeats in revolutionary struggles elsewhere strengthened conservative pressures within Soviet society. After years of war, famine, civil conflict, and economic collapse, the working class that had provided the revolution’s social base was exhausted. Administrative layers acquired increasing power. Political life within the revolutionary party deteriorated.

Joseph Stalin’s emergence must be placed within this process. The resulting conflict was not simply a contest between two ambitious politicians. Behind it were opposed political programmes. The theory of “socialism in one country” rationalised an increasingly nationalist orientation in which preservation of the Soviet bureaucracy’s position became paramount. Leon Trotsky’s conception of permanent revolution insisted that the fate of the Soviet workers’ state remained inseparably connected to the development of world revolution.

These competing strategic perspectives had international consequences. They shaped controversies over the Chinese Revolution, the rise of fascism in Germany, the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. Anyone attempting a global history of communism must therefore confront Trotskyism not simply as another branch of the communist family tree but as an organised Marxist challenge to the political foundations of Stalinism.

The strongest objection

Paul Mason’s defenders could reasonably answer that none of this proves Leon Trotsky represented an immaculate democratic socialism. It does not. They could point to the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the Red Terror, restrictions on opposition parties, and Leon Trotsky’s advocacy during the enormously difficult Civil War period for measures involving the militarisation of labour. These questions have generated an immense historical literature, and any serious appraisal of Bolshevism must confront them.

Indeed, the argument becomes stronger for doing so. The Marxist case against Stalinism should not depend upon constructing a sanitised picture of Soviet Russia before 1924. The revolution took place under catastrophic conditions. Its government made decisions that deserve examination and criticism. The historical debate concerns whether these measures sufficiently explain everything subsequently associated with Stalinism or whether a qualitatively different bureaucratic-political reaction developed under the pressure of isolation and defeat.

The mere existence of authoritarian measures before Joseph Stalin proves neither historical continuity nor historical inevitability. To establish that Stalinism was the necessary product of Bolshevism, one must explain why an organised opposition emerged against the bureaucracy, why the bureaucracy politically suppressed that opposition, why it had to outlaw its programme, and why so much of the revolutionary generation had eventually to be physically destroyed. Those events cannot simultaneously be treated as irrelevant and held up as evidence of an inevitable straight line from October to Stalin.

Stalin did not simply “continue” October.

This is where much conventional anti-communist historiography runs into a contradiction. If Joseph Stalin was carrying Vladimir Lenin’s project to its logical conclusion, why did his regime’s consolidation involve such extraordinary destruction of the personnel and traditions associated with the revolution? The answer cannot be that every victim was a principled socialist opponent of Stalinism. They plainly were not. Nor should we romanticise the period’s factions and political manoeuvres. But the scale of the attack upon the old Bolshevik generation remains historically significant. A regime confident that it represented a seamless continuation of October would scarcely have needed continually to rewrite October’s history.

Leon Trotsky was particularly intolerable because his political and literary activity preserved another record of the revolution and another conception of its historical significance. He participated directly in the events of 1905 and 1917, headed the Petrograd Soviet in 1917, and later became the Stalinist regime’s most prominent international opponent. The fight over historical memory was consequently inseparable from the political struggle over the future.

The Fourth International and the continuity question

This issue becomes still more acute with the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. For Leon Trotsky, Hitler’s rise, without effective resistance from the enormously powerful German workers’ movement, was decisive evidence of the Stalinised Communist International’s bankruptcy. He concluded that the Third International could no longer be politically regenerated and that a new revolutionary international had to be constructed.

One can agree or disagree with that conclusion. What cannot reasonably be done is to write the political history of communism as though it does not fundamentally complicate the identification of Stalinism with Marxism. The Fourth International asserted the opposite precisely: that defending Marxism now required an irreconcilable struggle against Stalinism. This is why the question of historical continuity matters. If Stalinism was communism, then organisations fighting Stalinism from the standpoint of international socialist revolution become anomalous or inconvenient footnotes. If Stalinism represented a bureaucratic degeneration of a workers’ state and a political betrayal of revolutionary internationalism, those same movements acquire central historical importance. A global history of communism must take a position on that question, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Why Trotsky breaks the picture

We can therefore return one final time to the question raised at the beginning: why does Leon Trotsky’s absence from the cover and promotional genealogy matter? Not because book-cover design constitutes historiography. It does not.

Not because we have evidence of Paul Mason sitting with his publisher and demanding, “Leave Trotsky out.” We do not. It matters because Trotsky disrupts the picture being presented. Put him back at the centre of the twentieth-century story, and “communism” no longer appears to move inexorably towards totalitarianism. Instead, there is revolutionary communism and Stalinism; internationalism and “socialism in one country”; the October Revolution and a bureaucracy that ultimately exterminated much of the generation that led it.

The Communist International emerged in the early revolutionary years, later becoming the Stalinised Comintern, with the bureaucracy and the Left Opposition fighting it. Suddenly, there was no single road. There was a crossroads. And if there was a crossroads, Stalinism cannot simply be declared the inevitable destination without reconstructing the struggle over which road to take. That is ultimately what makes Leon Trotsky so inconvenient to histories that seek to present Stalinism as the definitive historical judgement on revolutionary Marxism.

What is at stake

Paul Mason is certainly right about one thing: this history matters profoundly today. Capitalism confronts younger generations with widening social inequality, geopolitical conflict, environmental crisis, deteriorating public services and widespread insecurity. In describing Reds: A Global History of Communism, Paul Mason points to stagnant Western democracies, the climate crisis, and renewed arguments over alternatives to the existing social order. He explicitly says that his political purpose is to answer a generation asking whether capitalism can be replaced: “not like this”.

But the historical question remains: what did “this” mean? Did it mean the working class’s conquest of political power, revolutionary internationalism, or Marxism? Or did it mean the bureaucratic suppression of workers’ democracy, the nationalist rejection of international socialist revolution, and the destruction of the revolutionary movement that opposed those policies? These alternatives cannot be conflated without predetermining the conclusion.

The answer to the crimes of Stalinism is not to minimise them, still less to apologise for them. It is to understand their origins. And doing so requires recovering the history of those Marxists who fought the Soviet bureaucracy when doing so meant expulsion, persecution, imprisonment and ultimately death.

Leon Trotsky’s historical significance does not depend on portraying him as an infallible leader or an alternative secular saint. It rests on something far more important: Stalinism faced a Marxist opposition that challenged it in the name of international socialist revolution and sought to explain its emergence materially. This changes the historical equation. If Stalinism was already inevitably contained within Marxism and October, Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition become difficult facts to accommodate. Their struggle must either be marginalised or reduced to an unsuccessful contest for power within an essentially authoritarian movement.

But if Stalinism arose from the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the defeats of the international working class, and the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste, then Leon Trotsky belongs not at the margins of twentieth-century communist history but at its very centre. That is why his absence from the public image surrounding *Reds: A Global History of Communism* is so striking. The issue is not simply a missing face on a jacket; it is the missing historical alternative that face represents.

Mason wants to tell a new generation weighing whether capitalism can be replaced: not like this. But before that generation accepts his warning, it deserves to know that history offers another warning—one made not in retrospect by converts to liberalism or defenders of the existing order, but from within the revolutionary Marxist movement itself.

It warned that nationalism would destroy socialist internationalism; bureaucratic privilege would suffocate workers’ democracy; subordinating the international working class to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces would bring catastrophic defeats; and Stalinism threatened not to fulfil the programme of October, but to destroy it. The bureaucracy tried to settle that political argument through repression. It murdered revolutionaries, erased people from photographs, rewrote the history of 1917, and ultimately sent an assassin after Leon Trotsky himself. But it could not erase the historical question he represented.

The history that cannot be erased

For a new generation once again questioning whether capitalism represents the final form of human society, the conflict between Trotsky and Stalinism is anything but an academic dispute. It concerns whether the catastrophe that overwhelmed the twentieth-century communist movement was the inevitable product of socialist revolution or the outcome of its isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and the defeat of the internationalist perspective on which October was based.

This is why the answer to Stalinism cannot be a retreat into an ethically improved capitalism, supplemented by appeals to democracy and “universal human values”. The immense inequality, militarism, political reaction and social insecurity driving workers and young people towards anti-capitalist conclusions are not historical misunderstandings. They arise from capitalism itself. To invoke Stalinism as the final warning against revolutionary politics is therefore to evade the very social contradictions producing renewed interest in socialism.

Nor does answering Mason require concealing the conflicts and repressions of the early Soviet state or turning Trotsky into an infallible revolutionary saint. It requires something more serious: restoring the political alternatives that were actually fought over. The Left Opposition showed that Stalinism faced opposition from within the Marxist movement, in the name of workers’ democracy, socialist internationalism, and world revolution.

That is precisely what breaks the comforting historical equation in which Marx leads inevitably to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin and Stalin ultimately to the gulag. History offered alternatives, and political struggle defeated them rather than historical inevitability disproving them. Any genuinely global history of communism must confront that struggle. Trotsky may be absent from the public picture surrounding Reds: A Global History of Communism. You cannot easily remove the historical struggle he represents. And for a generation searching once again for a way beyond capitalism, recovering that suppressed history is not merely about understanding the past. It is part of preparing for future struggles.

Selected bibliography

Avrich, Paul. Kronstadt 1921. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

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

Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1950–53.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin: A Political Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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

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

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

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Lewin, Moshe. Lenin’s Last Struggle. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

Mason, Paul. Reds: A Global History of Communism. London: Apollo, 2026. The UK hardback was published on 27 August 2026. [waterstones.com], [politicos.co.uk]

Rabinowitch, Alexander. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.

Rogovin, Vadim Z. Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years. Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books.

Service, Robert. Trotsky: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 2009.

Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.

Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 vols. 1932.

Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Stalin School of Falsification. 1937.

Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1936.

Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Programme. 1938.