Sextortion, image-based sexual abuse and the online exploitation of children are spreading fast across the Philippines. They grow out of mass poverty, a labour-export economy and the profit drive of the tech monopolies, and Manila’s political establishment has neither the will nor the means to stop them.
Over the past decade, the Philippines has become one of the main centres of a global trade in sexual blackmail. In its most common form, a perpetrator wins a victim’s trust online, gets hold of intimate images, then threatens to send them to family, friends or employers unless the victim pays money or hands over more material. Images are sometimes obtained by deception, sometimes recorded in secret, and increasingly faked outright with artificial intelligence.
The victims are Filipino and foreign: schoolchildren in the provinces, young women blackmailed by former partners, overseas workers, and teenage boys in Britain, the United States and Hong Kong. The crimes are carried out on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram and TikTok. Some of the richest corporations on earth own the platforms.
The arrests reported in the Philippine press this year give only a glimpse. A man in Zamboanga City was arrested in February for blackmailing a former girlfriend with explicit photographs. The National Bureau of Investigation arrested another man in January for leaking intimate videos to coerce an ex-partner. A woman overseas Filipino worker (OFW) was targeted by a sextortionist shortly after landing at Ninoy Aquino International Airport. In March, police in Manila arrested a suspect accused of extorting foreign nationals online.
The Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA), which tracks technology-facilitated gender-based violence, documented 52 cases in the first half of 2026 alone. It noted that reports rose in the opening months of the year. It covers only cases that reach the foundation. The real figure is many times higher. Shame, family pressure to protect the household’s reputation and distrust of the police keep most victims silent.
A generation targeted
Children and adolescents bear the brunt. The Disrupting Harm in the Philippines study was published in 2022 by ECPAT International, Interpol and UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti. It surveyed internet-using children aged 12 to 17. One in five said they had suffered grave forms of online sexual exploitation and abuse in the previous year, including blackmail into sexual acts and the sharing of their images without consent. Scaled to the population, the researchers estimated that as many as two million children were affected in a single year.
Where this abuse happened on social media, Facebook and Messenger accounted for more than 90 per cent of cases. Most cases Philippine authorities investigated were first reported by foreign police forces and NGOs, not detected at home.
UNICEF has estimated that 80 per cent of Filipino children are vulnerable to online sexual abuse. In 2016, it described the country as the global epicentre of the trade in live-streamed child sexual abuse. Its national study listed the conditions that make the country such fertile ground: widespread English, cheap access to phones and the internet, and well-established money-transfer networks built to serve the remittance economy. In some cases, it found, children’s own parents arranged the abuse.
A July 2025 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime found that teenage boys are by far the largest target group in the recent surge of financial sextortion. Typically, criminals approach them through fake profiles posing as girls. The same report noted that the Philippines is home to criminals who run sextortion schemes against victims in other countries. Britain’s National Crime Agency made this point in a 2025 campaign aimed at boys. Government operations rescued 41 minors from online sexual abuse in January and February 2026 alone.
Blackmail runs like a call centre.
Sextortion in the Philippines is not mainly the work of lone individuals. Much of it is an organised industry, and it copies the labour discipline of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector that dominates the country’s urban employment.
This became clear in 2014, when Philippine police and Interpol arrested 58 people in a crackdown on an international sextortion network. In Bicol, investigators found that the operations were disguised as call centres. The Bicol groups had also built their own payment arrangements, designed to be hard for the authorities to trace. A Hong Kong police official told Inquirer.net that almost all the sextortion cases in his territory could be traced back to the Philippines.
At the time, the national police chief called the Philippines the “sextortion capital of the world.” Interpol officials rejected the label, pointing out that similar operations existed elsewhere and that the Philippines had been singled out because Manila had requested cooperation. That point deserves to be stressed. The problem is not a Filipino national trait. It is what happens when a desperate, educated, English-speaking workforce is plugged into a global digital economy with few legitimate outlets.
The money flows through the same channels as the remittances of millions of OFWs. A 2023 study by the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab found that money service businesses such as Western Union and PayPal remain the main payment routes in online child exploitation cases in the Philippines. The corporations that profit from the remittance trade have every incentive to keep that infrastructure fast, cheap and lightly policed.
The class roots of the crisis
The official discourse treats sextortion as a problem of individual morality, parental neglect or poor “digital literacy.” This conveniently ignores the social conditions that produce it.
The Philippines is a country where millions of workers survive on informal and precarious jobs. Millions more are exported abroad as domestic workers, seafarers and care workers because the domestic economy cannot employ them. Whole families depend on remittances. Phones and cheap data are everywhere, but decent jobs are not. In these conditions, criminal syndicates find no shortage of recruits, and abusers find no shortage of vulnerable targets.
The COVID-19 pandemic made everything worse. Under Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines imposed some of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world, enforced by police and the military. Children were banned from public spaces such as parks and shopping malls and confined to their homes and their phones. At the same time, mass layoffs plunged millions of families into deeper poverty. Researchers and child welfare agencies agree that online sexual exploitation surged in this period, driven in part by job losses and economic hardship.
The overseas worker system adds its own vulnerabilities. Long separations break up families and relationships, and intimate communication moves online. Workers abroad and their partners at home become targets for blackmail, and the threat of exposure to an employer can mean the loss of a job on which a whole family depends.
The tech monopolies and the deepfake threat
The platforms through which this abuse is carried out are not neutral pipes. Meta, which owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, built its fortune on maximising engagement and harvesting user data. Its business model depends on letting strangers connect with as little friction as possible. Facebook dominates internet use in the Philippines to the point that, for many, it is the internet.
These corporations spend vast sums on lobbying and public relations, and comparatively little on protecting the people who use their services in poorer countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Content moderation in Filipino languages has long been under-resourced. When Meta made end-to-end encryption the default on Messenger at the end of 2023, child protection organisations warned it would make abuse harder to detect. The company went ahead regardless.
Now artificial intelligence is adding a new dimension. Cheap tools can produce convincing fake sexual images of anyone from an ordinary photograph. In February 2026, Philippine child-rights groups warned of rising online child exploitation using AI tools. Victims no longer need ever to have shared an intimate image to be blackmailed or humiliated. The same technology companies racing to dominate the AI market, and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into it, have shown little interest in the social consequences.
Laws on paper, poverty in practice
The Philippine ruling class points to its laws: the Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, the Safe Spaces Act of 2019 and the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children law of 2022. Each was passed with fanfare. Neither has stemmed the tide.
The Cybercrime Prevention Act is telling. Its most vigorous use has been its online libel provisions, wielded against journalists and critics of the government. The police anti-cybercrime units are small and swamped. Courts are slow. Victims who come forward face a gruelling process, and many give up.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration has other priorities. It has thrown open the country to an expanded US military presence and is integrating the Philippines into Washington’s war preparations against China. Resources flow to the armed forces while public schools, social welfare and child protection services are starved. Arrests of individual blackmailers and periodic raids on “dens” make good headlines, but they leave untouched the conditions that keep recruits and new victims coming.
The sexual exploitation of Filipino children and young people is a crime of global capitalism. It is fed by the poverty created by decades of imperialist domination, by an economy organised around exporting cheap labour, and by tech corporations that profit from every click. Ending it requires more than awareness campaigns and tougher sentences. It requires that the vast resources monopolised by a tiny elite be used to guarantee every family secure, well-paid jobs, decent housing, free quality education and real social services.
It also requires that the social media giants be taken out of private hands and placed under the democratic control of the working class, so that they are run to meet human need rather than to maximise profit. That is a task facing workers in the Philippines, the United States, Britain, and around the world, who must unite across borders in the fight for socialism.
Members of the London Library are contesting a multimillion-pound redevelopment that would allocate significant space in the historic St James’s Square institution to catering, events, and a rooftop terrace, even as the Library acknowledges it is running out of room for books. The dispute has highlighted fundamental questions regarding the commercialisation of libraries and other cultural institutions. Space for books, reading, and research is increasingly evaluated in terms of revenue and financial return. At the same time, users of these institutions have little influence over decisions that shape their future.
Book historian Nicholas Pickwoad has intervened by challenging both the redevelopment and the treatment of dissenting members in a recent letter to the Times Literary Supplement. Pickwoad trained in bookbinding and conservation and has served as an adviser on book conservation to the National Trust. His career includes work at Harvard University Library and the Ligatus Research Centre. Founded in 1841, the London Library calls itself the world’s largest independent lending library, with a collection of about one million volumes. It has served generations of writers and researchers and continues to promote itself as a place for reading, writing, and research. The institution now also prominently brands itself as “the home of literary inspiration”. This shift in language coincides with a physical transformation of the building, as catering, events, and attracting new audiences become increasingly significant.
A central contradiction underlies the controversy. The London Library states that its shelf capacity is “effectively full,” with occupancy in many areas between 92 and 95 per cent. The Library adds approximately 6,000 books each year, necessitating about 180 metres of additional shelving annually. Space constraints are already impacting the collection. The Library has acknowledged that it is considering removing materials that no longer meet members’ needs, are available electronically, or fall outside its core collection strengths. Depending on the material, this may involve sale, donation, or recycling. Under these conditions, valuable space is being committed to enhanced catering and events provision.
The controversy is not fundamentally about members’ access to coffee. The essential issue concerns what should take priority when one of Britain’s most important independent libraries lacks sufficient space for its books. The plans’ financial scale has intensified opposition. GB News reported in January 2026 that a development including a rooftop garden and café was estimated at £5 million. By March, The Londoner described opponents contesting £7 million plans for a sixth-floor café and rooftop terrace.
Management has presented the development as part of an effort to expand the institution. GB News reported a target of attracting 800 additional members, generating more than £400,000 a year in membership fees. Such arguments are now commonplace across the cultural sector. Libraries, museums, universities, galleries, and similar institutions are required to seek additional revenue sources and to utilise their buildings for commercial purposes. Catering, venue hire, and events are presented as essential ways to finance the institution’s core cultural functions.
But the supposedly supporting activities increasingly reshape the institution they are meant to sustain. A reading room or a collection of books generates no immediate financial return, whereas a commercial event, catered function, or café does. When income generation becomes the primary criterion for evaluating space, activities fundamental to a library inevitably face pressure from those that can produce revenue.
The conflict has intensified as opponents claim that efforts to organise among members have been restricted. Campaigners distributed leaflets opposing the development, after which the Library introduced a rule prohibiting the distribution of “posters, flyers, leaflets, notices or similar anywhere on the premises”. Historian and former trustee Rick Stroud publicly condemned the restriction as censorship “right at the heart of a library”. The Library denied accusations of suppressing debate and said it welcomed members expressing their views on its plans.
The controversy persisted. The Londoner reported that chairman Simon Godwin confronted campaigners distributing flyers on the Library steps and informed them that leafleting would be prohibited. Godwin was formally confirmed as chairman of the trustees in November 2023. Before this role, he was a founding partner and finance director of the asset-management firm Fundsmith. He was also a long-standing London Library member and part of its Founders’ Circle of supporters.
This background is not primarily personal. It points towards the wider system of governance imposed upon cultural institutions. Decisions affecting collections, reading spaces and the conditions experienced by researchers are increasingly made within structures dominated by considerations of fundraising, finance, property utilisation, branding and institutional growth. Members and professional users are asked for their views, but they do not exercise effective control. Defenders of the redevelopment have attempted to present the controversy as a conflict between modernisation and conservative resistance to change. This is a false opposition.
There is nothing inherently progressive about replacing space devoted to books or scholarship with commercial activities. Nor is there anything reactionary about insisting that a library’s principal responsibility is to preserve books, develop its collections, and provide the best possible conditions in which they can be studied.
The members’ alternative is modest. Rather than a fully catered commercial café, opponents have supported an improved members’ room where readers can rest, talk, eat and obtain tea or coffee without transforming another part of the institution into a hospitality operation.
The issue is therefore not improvement versus stagnation. It is what constitutes an improvement to a library. The London Library dispute has important precedents. In 2013, an intense controversy erupted at Senate House Libraries at the University of London over plans to sell four seventeenth-century Shakespeare folios. Academic opposition led to the abandonment of the proposed sale, and the library director subsequently resigned.
The Senate House struggle revealed in particularly stark form a contradiction that confronts collections everywhere. From a scholarly standpoint, rare books and historic collections constitute part of humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance. From the market’s standpoint, they can appear as financial assets whose sale might release capital for another purpose. The same contradiction applies to buildings. To a reader or historian, a reading room provides the physical conditions necessary for intellectual work. Viewed according to commercial criteria, the same room occupies extraordinarily expensive central London property while generating little or no direct income.
The London Library is admittedly a private subscription institution whose membership cannot be identified with the millions who depend on public-library services. But this does not make the controversy any less significant. If an institution with an international reputation, around a million volumes and a comparatively affluent membership is under pressure to devote scarce space to catering and income-generating functions even while its book stacks approach capacity, the situation facing public libraries deprived of adequate funding is still more severe.
Years of austerity have demonstrated the consequences. Libraries must reduce expenditure, justify their premises, and dispose of supposedly surplus resources. Cultural provision that previous generations fought to establish is treated as a financial liability whenever it cannot demonstrate an immediate commercial return. This development cannot be separated from the increasing concentration of social wealth at the opposite pole of society. Vast private fortunes coexist with libraries, universities, museums, and arts institutions permanently instructed that they lack sufficient money to support their basic activities.
The claim that cultural institutions must therefore accommodate themselves to the market accepts precisely the conditions responsible for their degradation. Libraries cannot ultimately be defended according to commercial criteria because their true social value cannot be measured commercially. No meaningful financial calculation can express the value of preserving an obscure book until a future researcher needs it, allowing a young writer to encounter ideas unavailable elsewhere, or maintaining collections accumulated through generations of intellectual labour. The same principle extends beyond libraries to archives, museums, galleries, orchestras and universities. Their essential purpose is incompatible with reducing every part of cultural life to a source of income. The opposition mounted by London Library members therefore deserves support. But defending the institution means more than defeating a particular café plan. It requires rejecting the idea that culture must continually demonstrate its profitability to justify its existence.
Libraries and other cultural institutions should receive the resources required to expand their collections, employ skilled staff, preserve their buildings and make knowledge as widely accessible as possible. Readers, researchers and those who work in these institutions must have a genuine democratic voice in determining their development. The struggle over the London Library is, in this sense, one expression of a much broader conflict: whether humanity’s accumulated cultural inheritance is to be maintained and expanded as a social resource, or increasingly subordinated to the demands of the market.
Bibliography
Primary source
Pickwoad, Nicholas. Letter concerning the London Library redevelopment and members’ opposition. Times Literary Supplement, 2026. Exact issue number and publication date to be confirmed.
Pip: Russell Brand is in prison, and freerein61 has written what might be the most carefully argued piece you will read about why that fact — whatever you think of it — should make everyone uncomfortable.
Mara: The episode covers one extended argument: what happens to democratic rights when accusation, amplification, and corporate punishment arrive years before a jury does. Let's start with the case itself and what it reveals about how guilt gets decided in public life.
The Era of Trial by Social Media Comes of Age
Pip: The central claim here is structural, not personal. The argument is that a new sequence has replaced the rule of law in public life — and that the replacement happened so gradually that most people have stopped noticing it.
Mara: The post sets out that sequence precisely. The concern is "the evolving political and legal context in which guilt is determined in public life, and the degree to which foundational democratic principles are being supplanted by a sequence of accusation, media amplification, corporate sanction, and only subsequently, judicial process."
Pip: So the order is inverted. Punishment first, trial later — sometimes years later. And by the time the jury speaks, the economic and reputational damage is already permanent.
Mara: That is exactly the stakes the post identifies. Search engines embed allegations in a person's permanent digital identity. Employment disappears. Contracts end. Even acquittal, as the Kevin Spacey case demonstrated, cannot restore what years of publicity removed. The post notes that the key institutional question shifts from what has been proven to what will happen to us if we are seen not to punish.
Pip: Which is a remarkably honest description of how reputational risk management works — and a fairly damning one.
Mara: The post draws on several historical cases to make the pattern visible. The Cliff Richard case, where a police search was broadcast before any charge was laid. Operation Midland, where allegations about a Westminster abuse network collapsed entirely and the accuser was eventually convicted. The Lucy Letby conviction, raised not to question the verdict but to argue that journalism must retain the capacity to scrutinise established narratives without that scrutiny being treated as morally illegitimate.
Pip: The Birmingham Six get a mention there too — a reminder that the campaigns that eventually overturned those convictions required exactly the kind of scepticism toward dominant narratives that the current media environment actively punishes.
Mara: On the class dimension, the post is direct: "precisely because workers lack wealth and institutional power, they require protection against state and corporate arbitrariness more urgently than society's privileged layers." A millionaire can retain solicitors and reputation managers. A worker facing an online accusation usually cannot.
Pip: And the attention economy makes this worse, not better. The post puts it sharply: the platform's economic logic collides directly with the deliberative requirements of justice. A jury must listen. An algorithm must engage.
Mara: The Online Safety Act 2023 enters the argument here — not as simple censorship, but as a regulatory framework that places the state in an increasingly expansive relationship with private platforms. The post is careful to say the concern is not that Ofcom officials directly police opinions, but that the infrastructure for doing so is being constructed, and that powers created to target unpopular defendants rarely remain limited to them.
Pip: The conclusion is unambiguous: an accusation is not a conviction, virality is not proof, and a society that lets corporations decide who may participate in public life will not produce democratic speech. Where that leaves us is squarely in the territory of who controls the infrastructure of communication itself.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is that democratic rights were never gifts — they were won through struggle, and they require active defense precisely when they are least popular to defend.
Pip: Next time, we will see where that argument goes when the crisis deepens. Stay with us.
On 5 November 2026, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted Russell Brand of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. The jury of eight men and four women, required by Mr Justice Bennathan to reach unanimous verdicts, acquitted him on two further counts of rape and one of attempted indecent assault. The convictions relate to offences committed between 2004 and 2009. The rape conviction concerns a 21-year-old woman whom Brand met after a performance in west London in 2009.
Brand, 51, denied every charge and was remanded in custody following the verdict. On 9 November, Mr Justice Bennathan sentenced him to 10 years and six months’ imprisonment. Brand must serve at least two-thirds of the sentence before becoming eligible for release.
In his sentencing remarks, the judge told Brand that as he became famous he had also become a“sexual predator”, and said that the offences demonstrated a disregard for women’s right to refuse sexual contact. The judge also stressed that the sentence concerned only the offences of which the jury had convicted Brand and that he disregarded allegations on which the jury had returned not-guilty verdicts. The Metropolitan Police have said that further allegations concerning Brand remain under investigation. Those allegations are separate from the convictions for which he was sentenced and have not been determined by a court.
The victims are entitled to lifelong anonymity, and this article does not cover their testimony. What concerns us here is the social and political figure: the man who, little more than a decade ago, was hailed in liberal circles as the voice of a disaffected generation, and whose political evolution subsequently carried him into the orbit of Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and the Trump movement.
Brand’s trajectory is not merely a story of personal collapse. It is a concentrated expression of the bankruptcy of celebrity “anti-politics”, of the media industry that manufactured and protected him, and of the decay of a petty-bourgeois radicalism that rejected the working class as the conscious agent of social change. That Brand could travel in scarcely a decade from calling for “revolution” on BBC Newsnight to sharing platforms with figures associated with the American right is itself a devastating commentary on the politics he represented.
An honest accounting must also be made of the proceedings against him. When the allegations first became public in September 2023, following a joint investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches, the World Socialist Web Site warned against trial by media and insisted upon the presumption of innocence. That principle did not entail declaring Brand innocent. It meant insisting that criminal guilt could be determined only through established judicial procedures in which allegations could be tested, and the accused could mount a defence.
That process has now taken place. Brand was charged, represented by senior counsel, tried before a jury over several weeks, convicted on some counts and acquitted on others. Each charge had to be determined according to the evidence relating to it. Whatever criticisms socialists must make of the capitalist state and judicial system, the proceedings themselves refute the crude contention circulated by Brand’s right-wing defenders that a fair trial was simply impossible in Britain.
The celebrity revolutionary, 2013–2015
Brand’s emergence as a political celebrity was facilitated by the very institutions that he professed to oppose. In October 2013, he guest-edited the New Statesman and, days later, sat opposite Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. Brand said he had never voted, denounced a political establishment subordinated to corporations, and spoke in favour of a “socialist egalitarian” society.
The interview was watched millions of times. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, years of austerity and the Liberal Democrats’ repudiation of their promises over university tuition fees, Brand’s denunciations struck a chord with many young people who saw nothing in the official political establishment that represented their interests.
Sections of the liberal media responded in an instructive way. Rather than seriously interrogating what Brand meant by revolution, parts of the press transformed him into a political phenomenon. Prospect included him among its “World Thinkers” in 2015. His book Revolution, published in 2014, became a bestseller. His YouTube series The Trews attracted a large audience, while his involvement in the struggle of tenants at the New Era estate in Hoxton against eviction by a US investment fund seemed to connect his rhetoric to genuine social opposition.
Yet the political content of Brand’s “revolution” was always profoundly confused. It combined elements of anarchism, Eastern mysticism, self-help and twelve-step recovery culture with hostility towards organised politics itself. Instead of calling for the construction of an independent political movement of the working class, he counselled abstention from conventional politics and elevated personal transformation and local direct action into substitutes for political programme, organisation and historical perspective.
Capitalism consequently appeared not primarily as a definite system of property and class relations, founded upon private ownership of the means of production and production for profit, but as a kind of spiritual and psychological disorder. Alienation might therefore be overcome through consciousness, authenticity, community action and individual awakening. Class in the Marxist sense, as an objective social relationship and the foundation of political organisation, virtually disappeared.
This perspective’s limitations were dramatically exposed within eighteen months. Days before the May 2015 general election, having previously encouraged his followers not to vote, Brand interviewed Labour leader Ed Miliband and urged support for Labour. The supposedly uncompromising rejection of establishment politics thus ended in an endorsement of the party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Iraq War and the deregulated City of London.
The episode revealed something fundamental. Without a programme, historical analysis or class orientation, radical rhetoric could swing abruptly from denunciation of the parliamentary system to accommodation with one of its principal parties. The “revolution” had discovered the ballot box almost overnight.
From the ‘left’ to the far right
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated Brand’s political evolution. His enormous online audience had originally been built through attacks on inequality, corporate power and the political establishment. Increasingly, however, these themes became entangled with scepticism concerning vaccination and public-health policies, alongside a growing preoccupation with vaguely defined “elites”, censorship and the “Deep State”. In 2022, his programme Stay Free with Russell Brand moved to Rumble, a video platform that became increasingly associated with conservative and right-wing online politics in the United States.
Some of Brand’s interventions still contained elements of genuine opposition to official policy, including criticism of the role of the United States and NATO in Ukraine. But these positions no longer fit within a coherent critique of imperialism or capitalism. Instead, opposition to war and corporate power increasingly coexisted with the themes and personalities of the American culture wars.
After the allegations against him emerged in 2023, Brand’s public political and personal identity shifted again. He converted publicly to Christianity, was baptised in 2024, and increasingly cultivated an audience among conservative Christians and supporters of the American right. He appeared with Tucker Carlson and became associated with political environments involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Turning Point USA.
The political distance travelled was considerable. A man once presented by sections of the British liberal establishment as the charismatic representative of anti-capitalist youth was now being welcomed by forces associated with Trump’s political movement. Yet this development should not simply be understood as a betrayal of a previously coherent socialist politics. No such politics existed to betray. Rather, Brand’s evolution exposed the inherent instability of his earlier outlook.
A politics that rejected the independent political mobilisation of the working class, interpreted complex social relations primarily through the actions of shadowy or corrupt elites, and elevated individual authenticity above programme and organisation possessed no reliable political compass. Its language of rebellion could therefore migrate remarkably easily between ostensibly left-wing and right-wing forms of populism. Under conditions of deepening social crisis, opposition to “the establishment” ceased to have any necessarily progressive content. Anti-politics became increasingly compatible with the politics of reaction.
The trial and the myth of the ‘political prisoner’
After the allegations became public, Brand increasingly portrayed himself as the victim of an establishment campaign directed against a dissident voice. Sections of the American right enthusiastically adopted this interpretation. Elon Musk publicly supported Brand after the allegations appeared in 2023. Tucker Carlson subsequently connected Brand’s predicament to his attacks on pharmaceutical companies, establishment institutions and Western policy towards Ukraine. After criminal charges were brought, Carlson presented the proceedings as politically motivated and questioned whether Brand could receive justice in Britain.
This campaign had little to do with a consistent defence of democratic rights. Brand had become a politically useful media figure, and his legal difficulties could therefore be incorporated into an existing narrative in which right-wing personalities and online influencers portrayed themselves as victims of an all-powerful liberal establishment. It was nevertheless necessary to reject the opposite position. Brand’s defenders’ politically reactionary arguments could not justify declaring him guilty before trial. Democratic rights cannot be defended selectively according to whether one approves of the accused.
That is why opposition to trial by media in 2023 was correct. The principle involved is elementary: allegations, however grave, are not criminal convictions. Guilt must be established through evidence tested before a court in proceedings in which the accused has the right to defend himself. The subsequent trial did precisely what Brand’s political defenders claimed could not occur. He was represented by experienced counsel and permitted to contest the allegations against him. His barrister urged the jury to distinguish between behaviour they might find personally objectionable and conduct proved to be criminal. The resulting verdicts show that the jury distinguished between the charges, returning both acquittals and convictions.
The claim that Brand was simply a “political prisoner” therefore cannot be sustained merely by asserting that he had become an opponent of establishment politics. His political opinions neither proved guilt nor provided immunity from criminal prosecution. Brand’s highly visible turn towards Christianity also became part of his new public identity. His appearances carrying a Bible and his repeated references to his faith fit neatly into the wider narrative of spiritual rebirth he had developed for his international audience. Whatever Brand’s personal beliefs, the political significance of this transformation is unmistakable. The former advocate of loosely defined spiritual revolution had reconstructed himself as a Christian dissident confronting what he and his allies described as a corrupt establishment.
The industry that made him
Any serious assessment of Brand must also examine the entertainment industry that created the conditions for his extraordinary celebrity. He committed the offences for which he was convicted while rising rapidly through British television and radio before moving into Hollywood. Brand’s deliberately provocative sexual persona was not incidental to this ascent. It became part of the commodity being sold. Broadcasters constructed programmes around his personality and cultivated the image of the uncontrollable celebrity provocateur. The commercial imperative was obvious: outrage generated attention, attention generated audiences, and audiences generated revenue.
The notorious 2008 BBC Radio 2 scandal involving obscene prank calls to the actor Andrew Sachs finally demonstrated that there were limits to what institutions could tolerate once controversy threatened the institution itself. But by then the mechanisms through which celebrity behaviour was indulged, normalised and monetised were already evident. Subsequent investigations into how concerns about Brand were handled raised broader questions about institutional culture and junior employees’ capacity to challenge powerful performers. The essential issue therefore cannot be reduced to the moral character of one celebrity.
This is where a socialist analysis must distinguish itself from the approach associated with the more affluent sections of the #MeToo milieu. In 2023, parts of the liberal media collapsed the distinction between accusation and conviction, turning the individual celebrity into the exclusive explanation for an entire institutional culture. Such an approach simultaneously threatens fundamental democratic principles and obscures the social relations that make abuses of power possible.
The hierarchical organisation of the entertainment industry places enormous influence in the hands of celebrities, executives and owners. Junior researchers, production workers, runners and other often precariously employed workers can find themselves dependent upon precisely those above them for continued employment and advancement. Celebrity itself is a commodity. Once corporations have invested substantial amounts of money in a profitable personality, enormous commercial incentives arise to preserve that personality’s market value.
The phenomenon is therefore not reducible simply to “bad men”. It involves structures of wealth, employment, power and dependency embedded within the entertainment business itself.
Brand’s later political evolution also cannot be separated from the economics of alternative online media. Digital media has created a lucrative market in permanent outrage. The successful influencer must continually produce novelty, controversy and conflict to maintain engagement. Audiences are encouraged to regard conventional journalism as inherently dishonest, while the influencer’s personality becomes the principal guarantee of truth. Grievance consequently becomes a business model.
Within this economy, every criticism can be framed as censorship, every institutional sanction as persecution, and every controversy as further confirmation that the dissident personality threatens powerful interests. Brand did not merely participate in this media economy. Increasingly, it shaped his public identity.
The lessons
The rise and fall of Brand contains political lessons extending far beyond one individual. The social anger he expressed in 2013 was genuine. Millions of young people had experienced the consequences of the financial crash, austerity, declining living standards, war and extreme concentrations of wealth. They confronted an official political culture seemingly incapable of articulating any alternative. That alienation has certainly not disappeared.
But Brand demonstrated precisely why such anger cannot be entrusted to celebrities, however charismatic, nor channelled through a politics that substitutes personality, lifestyle and authenticity for an understanding of class, history and political organisation. The extraordinary ease with which Brand travelled from the pages of the New Statesman to the political environment surrounding Tucker Carlson demonstrates the instability of celebrity anti-politics. A vague denunciation of corrupt “elites” does not constitute socialism.
Capitalism is not simply the rule of dishonest politicians, greedy bankers, pharmaceutical corporations, media executives or secretive bureaucracies. It is a historically developed social system based upon definite class relations and the private ownership of society’s productive forces. Without understanding this, opposition to capitalism can be redirected endlessly from one supposed enemy to another without ever confronting the social foundations of exploitation.
There is another lesson. It was correct in 2023 to oppose trial by media and insist upon the presumption of innocence. That principle does not disappear because a defendant subsequently proves unpopular, nor does it become retrospectively mistaken when a jury eventually returns guilty verdicts. The principle has now been tested through the judicial process. Brand faced criminal charges, contested those charges and was acquitted on some while being convicted on others. To continue to portray the verdict itself as sufficient proof of a political conspiracy is not a defence of democratic rights. It attempts to transform political sympathy for an individual into immunity from the ordinary requirements of criminal law.
Brand’s political career began with a genuine social phenomenon: mass disgust with inequality, official politics and the consequences of the capitalist crisis. But celebrity radicalism proved incapable of providing any way forward. The working class requires no prophets manufactured by the entertainment industry. It requires a political perspective grounded in the accumulated historical experience of the international workers’ movement and an organisation capable of uniting workers across national, racial and religious divisions against the capitalist system itself.
Brand once offered “revolution” without class, programme or party. What remained after the rhetoric had evaporated was the individual personality itself. That was always the fundamental weakness. And it was ultimately the political trajectory the project contained from the beginning.
Bibliography
Books and primary material
Brand, Russell (2014), Revolution. London: Century.
BBC Newsnight (2013), Jeremy Paxman interview with Russell Brand, broadcast 23 October 2013.
New Statesman (2013), issue guest-edited by Russell Brand, 24 October 2013.
Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics (2016). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Socialist and political commentary
Scripps, Thomas (2023), “Media mob lynches comedian and actor Russell Brand over sexual assault allegations”, World Socialist Web Site, 21 September 2023.
McRedmond, Finn (2023), “We have lost Russell Brand”, New Statesman, 7 March 2023.
McRedmond, Finn (2025), “Russell Brand’s transatlantic trial”, New Statesman, 30 May 2025.
Prospect (2015), “World Thinkers 2015: Russell Brand”, 16 February 2015.
News reports: allegations, charges and right-wing response
Mediaite (2023), “‘I Support Russell Brand’: Elon Musk gives full-throated backing”.
Salon (2023), “Right-wing conspiracists flock to support Russell Brand”, 20 September 2023.
Mediaite (2025), “Tucker Carlson calls on Trump to ‘rescue’ Russell Brand”.
NPR (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to rape, sexual assault charges in U.K.”, 30 May 2025.
PBS NewsHour/AP (2025), “Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault”.
Variety (2026), “Russell Brand’s rape trial delayed to October”.
News reports: verdict and sentencing
CNN (2026), “Actor and comedian Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 5 November 2026.
Al Jazeera (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault by UK court”, 5 November 2026.
The Hollywood Reporter (2026), “Russell Brand found guilty of rape and sexual assault at London trial”, 5 November 2026.
NPR (2026), “From comedian to convicted rapist: What to know about Russell Brand”, 5 November 2026.
CNN (2026), “Hiding in plain sight? Russell Brand’s conviction poses tough questions for UK entertainment industry”, 8 November 2026.
NPR (2026), “Russell Brand to learn sentence after being found guilty of rape and sexual assault”, 8 November 2026.
NBC News (2026), “Russell Brand awaits sentencing as he faces ‘significant’ prison time”, 9 November 2026.
Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation is a cultivated, erudite and often moving defence of literary translation. Published by Carcanet Press on 24 September 2026, the book is described by the publisher as a book-length essay on the translator’s craft and on translation as what Manguel considers the “keenest form of reading”. The volume also contains his own illustrations. Yet the book’s fascination lies not only in what it says about translation, but also in the questions its conception of culture leaves unanswered. Its strengths and limitations belong to a recognisable liberal-humanist tradition in which literature appears primarily as a conversation conducted across centuries between writers, books and exceptionally attentive readers. What recedes from view is the material world that makes this conversation possible: publishers, markets, property, censorship, wages and, above all, labour.
The title itself provides a way to develop a more materialist conception. Carcanet Press explains that the reverse side of the tapestry is the definition of translation Manguel takes from Don Quixote. The metaphor is extraordinarily suggestive. Look at a tapestry from the front, and the picture appears finished and coherent. Turn it around, and another reality is revealed: knots, crossings, loose ends and the physical construction that produced the visible image. Translation similarly refuses the illusion that literature arrives before us in an immaculate, self-sufficient form. Behind the translated sentence stands another sentence, and between them stands a human being making decisions. [carcanet.co.uk]
A materialist criticism begins from much the same reversal. It turns the apparently autonomous cultural object over. It asks what the completed surface conceals: who made it, under what conditions, through which institutions, for which audience and under whose ownership. If Manguel’s metaphor is pursued beyond the boundaries he establishes for it, therefore, the reverse side of the tapestry leads from literary aesthetics into political economy. The difficulty is that Manguel, having turned over the tapestry, remains fascinated principally by its threads. He cares less about the loom.
A lover rather than a specialist
Manguel, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has held a remarkable position in contemporary literary life as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and former director of the National Library of Argentina. Carcanet Press describes him as Argentine-Canadian and notes that he now lives in Lisbon. His career has always resisted easy professional categorisation. He belongs to the old republic of letters, moving between languages, libraries, literary histories and forms.
Translation is not for him an abstract subject. Carcanet Press notes that Manguel has translated Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar into English and Katherine Mansfield and Paul Éluard into Spanish. This practical experience matters because his argument rests upon translation as an exceptionally intimate encounter between reader and text. Translating means penetrating beneath the apparent transparency of words into questions of voice, rhythm, ambiguity and intention.
The publisher approvingly reproduces George Steiner’s description of Manguel as an “amateur” in the older, more generous sense of the word: “a lover rather than a specialist”. That characterisation captures both what makes Manguel’s writing attractive and what eventually limits it. His criticism refuses the bureaucratised compartmentalisation of contemporary academic life. For him, literature is a continuous historical conversation. A biblical text can illuminate a modern novel; Cervantes can supply an image through which the modern translator’s predicament becomes intelligible.
There is something genuinely valuable here. Against reducing reading to the acquisition of information, Manguel insists on attention. Translation reveals that words cannot simply be exchanged like identical units of currency. To translate is already to interpret. The translator must decide. No dictionary can abolish those decisions because a sentence’s meaning never resides exclusively in the individual meanings of the words that compose it. Tone, social register, historical association, irony, rhythm and the relationship of one sentence to everything surrounding it continually intervene. A translator consequently produces a reading of the original even where they strive for the greatest possible fidelity.
Here Manguel’s defence of translation rises above the merely antiquarian. Translation exposes something fundamental about literature itself. The apparently transparent act of reading involves interpretation, historical knowledge, comparison, and judgement. The translated text embodies this process. But at precisely this point another question presents itself. If translation is intellectual activity, interpretation and creation, then the translator is not merely the invisible intermediary between two literary personalities. The translator is also a worker.
Translation and the struggle over who may read
The political importance of translation long predates the contemporary publishing industry. The history of translating texts is inseparable from struggles over access to knowledge and over who possesses the authority to interpret it. The history of the vernacular Bible provides one of the clearest examples. William Tyndale’s English translation of scripture belonged to a tremendous transformation produced by printing, religious upheaval and the development of vernacular literacy. The issue was never simply whether one rendering of a Greek or Hebrew word was superior to another. Behind disputes over translation lay the far more dangerous question of whether ordinary people needed an established clerical hierarchy to mediate between themselves and sacred texts.
The subsequent history of revolutionary England reveals what could follow once texts and arguments escaped older institutional monopolies. The enormous expansion of pamphleteering and popular religious controversy accompanying the English Revolution allowed artisans, soldiers, preachers and political radicals to intervene directly in questions previously claimed as the preserve of churchmen, lawyers and rulers. Levellers, Diggers and religious radicals found within vernacular religious and political languages the means to formulate increasingly explosive questions about authority, representation, property and equality.
Translation in this sense belongs to the history of democratisation, but not in the comfortable meaning the term later acquired. Making forbidden, restricted or otherwise inaccessible texts available to wider populations could destabilise established authority. It altered not simply what people read but who could participate in intellectual and political argument. The same process took on an increasingly international character as bourgeois society grew. Philosophical, scientific and political works circulated beyond the linguistic environments in which they had originated. Ideas crossed frontiers that states, churches, and ruling classes repeatedly tried to police. Translation became one mechanism through which intellectual life acquired its genuinely international character.
The development of the socialist workers’ movement gave this process an entirely new historical significance. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later the vast literature generated by socialist movements worldwide, could not have become the theoretical inheritance of an international working class without translation. Translating socialist literature was not an ornamental supplement to political activity. It formed part of the movement’s practical work of education and organisation.
This history points towards something only partially captured by a liberal-humanist celebration of translation as intercultural understanding. Languages do not meet one another in some realm floating above society. Human beings speaking different languages encounter each other through migrations, empires, wars, trade, intellectual exchange and class struggle. Translation is therefore necessarily historical. The reverse of the tapestry is already beginning to look much more complicated.
The translator as worker
Manguel approaches translation above all as a man of letters contemplating a craft. But translation is also an occupation situated within the capitalist publishing industry. This distinction matters because the romantic language surrounding literary production has always served an ideological function. Writing, translating, illustrating and editing can be presented as callings whose supposedly privileged proximity to culture somehow places them outside ordinary questions of remuneration and working conditions. Yet precisely because many people undertake intellectual labour from genuine commitment, their attachment to the activity can itself become a mechanism through which poorly rewarded conditions are normalised.
The organisations representing translators make clear that contracts, payment and rights are not secondary concerns. Britain’s Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors, describes itself as the collective voice of literary translators and advises members on translator-publisher contracts and negotiating payment. It also says explicitly that it campaigns for translators’ rights and fairer working conditions.
The evidence from the United States points in the same direction. The Authors Guild states that literary translation requires creativity, talent, and skill. Still, translators’ work is often overlooked or taken for granted, including through failures to provide proper credit or ongoing royalties. Its model translation contract was created specifically to provide translators with a basis for negotiating better terms.
Such mundane contractual matters expose the social side of Manguel’s elevated conception of translation. If translation is profound reading, then somebody must be paid to undertake that reading. If it requires sustained intellectual attention, somebody must possess the time in which that attention can occur. If the finished translation embodies interpretative and creative judgement, the translator’s right to credit, remuneration and a continuing interest in the exploitation of that work cannot be dismissed as matters external to culture.
The Authors Guild’s model contract gives this struggle particularly concrete expression. Its proposed clauses include a translation fee alongside royalties from print, electronic and audiobook editions and shares from the licensing of subsidiary rights. The Guild notes that payment arrangements vary widely between publishers. The very necessity for such model provisions reveals the contradiction behind romantic conceptions of literary translation. Culture may be discussed in the vocabulary of inspiration, interpretation and artistic fidelity, but the translator ultimately confronts a contract. The capitalist commodity does not cease to be a commodity because the object being bought and sold happens to be a book.
The new pressure of artificial intelligence
The social contradiction becomes sharper with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence. Here the argument must avoid two equally unsatisfactory positions. One is technological romanticism, which treats human cultural activity as possessing a mystical essence that machinery can never approach. The other is technological determinism, which holds that the ability to automate part of an activity demonstrates the historical inevitability of replacing the humans performing it.
Neither begins with the decisive question: under whose control technology is introduced, for what social purpose, and who reaps the benefits?
Translators’ concerns about generative AI are not hypothetical. The Translators Association states that it is “deeply engaged” in protecting translators’ rights and their craft in the age of AI and says it has called for solidarity with human translators whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild has incorporated provisions on generative AI into its literary translation model contract.
The Society of Authors additionally advises those negotiating fees to establish a commissioner’s policy concerning AI and says it expects consent to be sought before AI is given access to authors’ materials. These developments demonstrate that AI is already an issue of rights, remuneration and control within literary work, not simply a philosophical argument about whether machines can translate.
This is where Manguel’s conception of translation becomes unexpectedly radical in its implications. If translation genuinely represents an especially intense form of reading, then translating cannot adequately be understood as the mechanical conversion of linguistic units. It embodies interpretation. But a materialist criticism should go further. The central problem is not deciding whether a machine output is “really” translation according to some abstract philosophical definition. The more important question is what happens to human labour when automated systems are introduced into publishing under capitalist ownership.
Machinery under capitalism has repeatedly been presented as liberation from labour, while workers experience it as intensified exploitation, unemployment, deskilling, or loss of control over the labour process. The contradiction arises not fundamentally from machinery itself, but from the social relations governing its use. AI potentially contains enormously progressive possibilities. Technology capable of overcoming linguistic barriers could enormously broaden international access to culture, historical documents, scientific research and everyday human communication. For socialists, there is no interest in defending unnecessary drudgery merely because humans previously performed it.
But under capitalist relations the central criterion governing technological adoption is not the enrichment of human experience. It is profitability. That distinction transforms the AI debate. The question should not be posed simply as “human translator versus machine”. Both are trapped within a social organisation of production that subordinates technological development to private accumulation. The genuine alternative would be to use advances in automation to reduce necessary labour while expanding the time and resources available for higher forms of cultural, intellectual and creative activity. In such circumstances AI might become an instrument available to translators rather than an economic weapon deployed against them.
Translation against nationalism
There is another reason translation should concern Marxists. In practice, the activity contradicts the nationalist mythology that cultures exist as self-contained, internally homogeneous organisms. Every translated book is evidence against such isolation. Languages continually absorb, transform and appropriate elements from one another. Literature develops through these exchanges. National traditions themselves emerge within international processes.
Marx and Engels recognised this tendency extraordinarily early. Capitalism created a world market and drew previously isolated national economies into an increasingly interconnected global system. Cultural production developed internationally alongside this process. Yet capitalism’s contradiction is that economic life grows ever more global while political power remains organised through rival capitalist nation-states. Translation occupies one of the cultural pressure points created by this contradiction. It demonstrates the objective internationalism of culture while remaining embedded in national markets, publishing structures, and economic power inequalities.
Not all linguistic exchanges therefore occur between equals. Some languages dominate the international publishing market while others remain peripheral. Which authors receive translation, which works obtain international distribution and which disappear outside their original languages are not purely literary decisions. Markets and institutions shape them. Consequently, the existence of world literature does not abolish material inequality any more than the world market abolishes national inequality. It reproduces these contradictions on a cultural level.
Yet translation contains another possibility. It makes available humanity’s accumulated imaginative and intellectual experience across geographical and historical boundaries. The same activity that capitalism turns into a specialised market also points beyond cultural nationalism towards the conception of culture as a genuinely common human inheritance.
Literature and the commodity
Here lies the deeper limitation of Manguel’s liberal humanism. Books and readers, libraries and writers, memories and conversations populate his intellectual world. This world is real, and defending it against intellectual impoverishment matters. But the danger is that the library becomes an idealised refuge from society rather than one of society’s products. Books cannot escape the commodity form merely because their content transcends it.
A publishing house must purchase or control rights, commission work, produce an edition, market it and sell copies. Authors and translators must earn their living. Distribution channels determine what reaches readers. The survival of literary works may depend upon libraries and public institutions whose budgets are themselves products of political struggle.
The cultural object consequently possesses the same double character that capitalism imposes elsewhere. It is simultaneously something created because human beings possess the need to express and understand their experience and something produced and circulated within definite economic structures. This does not diminish literature. On the contrary, understanding its material conditions makes a more serious defence possible.
Manguel’s tapestry metaphor permits precisely this kind of investigation. Once the work is turned around, we discover not only interpretative knots but a division of labour: author, translator, editor, designer, printer, distributor, bookseller, librarian and reader. Behind them stand institutions, technologies and property relations. The reverse side of the tapestry becomes society itself.
From humanism to materialism
The attraction of The Reverse Side of the Tapestry is therefore inseparable from its limitation. Manguel protects something genuinely precious: attentive reading, historical memory, linguistic subtlety and the conviction that literature creates relationships across languages and centuries. A Marxist criticism has no reason to reject this inheritance. Marxism did not arise through hostility to the achievements of human culture. It sought the social conditions under which those achievements would no longer remain the effective privilege of minorities. The difference lies elsewhere.
Liberal humanism ultimately appeals to enlightened individuals and institutions to protect culture. Materialism asks what social conditions culture needs to flourish and what forces have an interest in creating them. The translator therefore presents in miniature a much larger problem. How can serious intellectual work survive when the time needed to carry it out is continually measured against profitability? How can literature fulfil its universal possibilities while its production and distribution remain governed by private property? How can technological advances become instruments for enlarging human freedom rather than mechanisms for reducing labour costs?
These are not questions peculiar to translation. Writers, musicians, actors, researchers, journalists, designers and innumerable other cultural workers confront different forms of the same contradiction. The technology capable of distributing cultural works to billions exists alongside commercial and proprietary structures that seek to enclose intellectual production. Never has humanity possessed technological means of cultural communication remotely comparable to those available today, yet never has the pressure to translate attention, creativity and knowledge into measurable commercial value been more pervasive. The defence of culture therefore cannot finally depend upon nostalgia for a supposedly pre-technological literary civilisation. Nor can it depend upon persuading corporations to behave more benevolently towards creative workers. The problem is social.
Alberto Manguel, Alexander Voronsky and the Struggle for Artistic Truth
Translation occupies a peculiar position within literature. The translator creates sentences without being their original author, interprets while resisting the temptation to replace the author, and necessarily changes a work’s linguistic form while trying to preserve what made that form artistically meaningful. This raises the fundamental question confronting every serious translator: what in a work of literature must survive its passage from one language into another? Alberto Manguel and the Marxist literary critic Alexander Voronsky offer complementary answers.
For Manguel, translation begins with reading. In The Translator as Reader, he describes reading as a way to know more about the world and ourselves. He identifies the translator as potentially its most refined and knowledgeable practitioner. In The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation, he develops this preoccupation with translation as an exceptionally intense form of reading. The translator cannot remain a passive recipient of meaning. Every sentence demands interpretation: rhythm, ambiguity, historical association and tone must first be recognised before they can be recreated.
Voronsky approaches the problem from another direction. For him, genuine art constitutes a particular form of cognition. In On Art, he argues that art apprehends reality, human thoughts and feelings through concrete images rather than through abstract propositions. Artistic cognition depends upon intuition, although intuition does not eliminate technique or conscious analysis.
Placed beside Manguel’s conception of the translator as reader, this provides the basis for a richer conception of translation. The translator must not merely discover what the words say. The deeper task is to recover the artistic cognition contained within them.
A mechanically accurate translation can therefore remain artistically false. Every word might possess a plausible dictionary equivalent while rhythm is destroyed, irony flattened, ambiguity explained away, and differences between characters’ voices homogenised. Information survives while literature disappears. Conversely, unrestricted adaptation can become equally false by replacing the author’s artistic discovery with the translator’s preferences.
Voronsky’s discussion of the painter Mikhailov in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina illuminates the difficulty. He emphasises the artist’s capacity to penetrate appearances, discovering the significant and characteristic beneath what obscures it. He adopts Tolstoy’s metaphor of“removing the veils” to describe this artistic process. The genuine artist does not merely copy appearances but reveals something about reality that previously remained concealed. [marxists.org]
The translator confronts something analogous. Language itself has become a veil that must be removed and preserved at once. Russian cannot simply become English without transformation. Syntax, sounds, idioms and historical associations differ. Yet the translator must find an equivalent way to let another reader encounter the artistic relationships embodied in the original.
Here Manguel’s translator as reader and Voronsky’s artist as discoverer converge. The translator becomes a reader compelled to demonstrate the depth of a reading through recreation. An ordinary reader can pass over an ambiguity unnoticed. A critic can subsequently revise an interpretation. The translator must repeatedly decide what the ambiguity, rhythm or image is doing and choose words that recreate its function.
This labour also has a profoundly historical dimension. Languages carry the accumulated experiences of societies. Words carry associations shaped by history, social conflict, and cultural development. Translation therefore mediates between historical worlds as well as between vocabularies. Making a nineteenth-century Russian writer sound casually twenty-first-century may erase something essential; manufacturing artificial archaism can falsify the work just as seriously.
This explains translation’s importance to world culture. It challenges the confinement of literature within national boundaries by allowing artistic discoveries produced in one language and historical experience to become available within another. Reading crosses boundaries of time and place; translation materially facilitates that encounter.
A historical irony lies in Voronsky’s own case. His return to English-speaking readers itself depended heavily upon translation. Frederick S. Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, explained that little of Voronsky’s critical writings had previously appeared in English and that translating them helped recover a major Marxist literary figure suppressed under Stalinism. Here translation became an instrument of historical recovery. [wsws.org]
Manguel helps us understand why the translator must be an extraordinary reader; Voronsky helps identify what that reading seeks: the cognition of life embodied in artistic form. The translator must therefore create to preserve and transform, to remain faithful. At its greatest, translation does not merely carry words between languages. It lets one society’s artistic discovery of life live again within another language.
Who owns the loom?
The Reverse Side of the Tapestry remains an elegant and humane contribution to the literature of translation. According to its publisher, the book explicitly approaches literary translation as the translator’s craft and as an exceptionally intense form of reading. At the same time, Manguel brings his own substantial experience translating major writers between English and Spanish. These qualities make the book worth taking seriously. But its central metaphor ultimately demands to be carried further than liberal humanism permits. Translation is interpretation, certainly. But interpretation requires time, knowledge, training and labour. Labour takes place under social conditions. Those conditions involve contracts, remuneration and property. And property raises the question of class.
The development of artificial intelligence merely makes this chain of relationships more visible. The fundamental issue is not whether technological development should be halted to preserve every existing cultural occupation unchanged. Such a programme would be neither achievable nor desirable. The question is instead whether technological progress will be subordinated to private profit or consciously employed to extend human freedom and culture.
A socialist organisation of cultural production would not erect barriers between technology and creativity. It would seek to free both from their subordination to profit. Automation capable of reducing routine work should increase the time human beings possess for education, thought, creativity and leisure rather than threatening their livelihoods. The increasingly international circulation of culture should become the basis for fuller human communication rather than another field for corporate accumulation.
Translation demonstrates particularly vividly why this question cannot finally be resolved nationally. Translators inhabit the spaces between languages by profession. Their work testifies every day to the inadequacy of national boundaries as containers for human culture. The defence of their labour therefore points logically to workers’ broader international interests.
Manguel begins from the back of the tapestry. It is an inspired metaphor because every apparently seamless work of art conceals the process through which it came into existence. Turn it over, and the order of the finished image dissolves into knots and crossed threads. The observer discovers construction where only beauty had appeared.
But turn it over far enough and something more becomes visible. Someone selected the material. Someone developed the skill required to work it. Someone performed the labour. Someone determined the pattern. And within a class society, someone controls the conditions under which that labour is undertaken and the product distributed. That is where a materialist criticism must begin where Manguel stops.
The Reverse Side of the Tapestry asks us to admire the hidden threads that make literature possible. The task today is to follow those threads from the book into society itself: from translation to labour, from labour to property, and from property to class. The decisive question is no longer merely what we discover when we turn the tapestry over. It is who does the weaving, and who owns the loom?
Bibliography
Authors Guild. “Literary Translation Model Contract.” 14 April 2021. The Guild describes the model contract as intended to promote fair contractual terms and payment for literary translators and includes provisions concerning generative AI.
Authors Guild. “Negotiating Literary Translation Contracts.” 2 June 2022. Discussion of translation fees, royalties, credit and rights. [authorsguild.org]
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part II, 1615.
Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.
Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo, 1997.
Manguel, Alberto. The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2026. Carcanet lists the paperback at £14.99, ISBN 9781800175808, with publication on 24 September 2026. [carcanet.co.uk]
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
Society of Authors. “Rates and Fees.” Guidance addressing payment, rights and the use of AI in commissioned work. [societyofauthors.org]
Pip: Alberto Manguel asks whether literature can compel society to recognize the evidence of facts — which is a braver question than most cultural essays dare to ask, and a harder one than most dare to answer.
Mara: freerein61 takes that question seriously in a post that moves from Manguel's Resistance through Aleksandr Voronsky's aesthetics, the Argentine dictatorship, and the politics of artificial intelligence. Let's start with what Manguel actually argues — and where the argument runs out of road.
Literature as Moral Protest — and Its Limits
Pip: The central tension here is between literature as something that illuminates reality and literature as something that can transform it — and whether Manguel's conception of resistance can hold both at once.
Mara: The post frames Manguel's book as asking whether society can be compelled to recognize the evidence, and whether the writer bears responsibility when truth comes under political attack. His tentative answer is captured in a phrase the post returns to repeatedly: "perhaps that is enough."
Pip: That hesitation is doing a lot of work. If affirmation is all resistance can offer, the post argues, then Manguel has reached the ceiling of the liberal conception — illumination without transformation.
Mara: The post is precise about why. It draws on Aleksandr Voronsky's Art as the Cognition of Life to sharpen the point: "Art is the cognition of life. It is therefore a form of thinking about the world in which the symbols and signs of culture are wielded in the expression of feelings, emotion and thoughts." The upshot is that art does not merely reflect reality — it is one of the means through which reality becomes known.
Pip: Which raises the stakes considerably. If literature is genuinely cognitive, then "perhaps that is enough" starts to sound like a scientist saying perhaps observation is enough.
Mara: The post uses Dante as the counter-example. The Divine Comedy achieves universality not by floating above history but by being inseparable from it — naming individuals, condemning corruption, placing popes in a moral universe. The Commedia's power comes from that interpenetration of the personal, political, and historical.
Mara: The contemporary vocabulary of resistance moves in the opposite direction. The post argues it has become a term that accommodates almost any individual disapproval while leaving the social foundations of what is being resisted unexplored.
Pip: The Trevor Griffiths discussion — a 2008 conversation with WSWS arts editor David Walsh — is brought in here as a useful contrast. Griffiths belonged to a generation shaped by actual mass radicalisation, where the connection between culture and collective social movement was lived experience, not aspiration.
Mara: And the post traces what happened when that connection broke. Defeats of working-class movements, Thatcherism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union — these shifted intellectual life away from transformation and toward transgression, personal expression, symbolic protest. Revolution gave way to resistance. The word fitted the changed climate because it requires no social force, no historical objective, no question of political power.
Pip: On artificial intelligence, the post insists the decisive issue is ownership, not technology as such. AI represents socially generated productive capacity concentrated in private hands — the same contradiction Marx identified, now unusually visible because the training material is humanity's collective culture.
Mara: The post is careful not to demand politically obedient literature. It explicitly defends artistic freedom and cites the disaster of Stalinist socialist realism as the warning. The criticism of Manguel is not that Resistance lacks a revolutionary programme. It is that resistance conceived as permanent moral protest tacitly assumes the forces being resisted will themselves remain permanent.
Pip: The final formulation is worth sitting with: literature is not enough, but it is necessary. Books become historically powerful when the truths they reveal encounter a social force capable of acting upon them.
Mara: Which means the reader, as the post puts it, is never simply a reader — they are also a worker, tenant, parent, student. At some point they close the book and re-enter the world.
Pip: The question Manguel raises — can literature help us see the world as it really is — turns out to demand a more unsettling answer than he offers.
Mara: Seeing clearly and acting on what you see are different capacities. That gap is where the next set of arguments will have to live.
“Life aims to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem”
Henry Miller- The Wisdom of the Heart
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” ― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
“The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure, secret, almost impossible to explain.” ― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
“Art is ‘the cognition of life.’ It is therefore a form of thinking about the world in which the symbols and signs of culture are wielded in the expression of feelings, emotion and thoughts…”
Aleksandr Voronsky-Art as the Cognition of Life
Literature in an age of reaction
Alberto Manguel has spent much of his intellectual life writing about reading, books, libraries and the preservation of cultural memory. That is no small matter at a time when culture is increasingly subordinated to commercial calculation; libraries and other public institutions face financial pressure. Serious reading is forced to compete with a digital environment organised overwhelmingly around speed, distraction and profit. His latest work, Resistance, published in Yale University Press’s “Why I Write” series, poses questions that should concern every serious reader and writer. Can society be compelled to recognise the evidence? Can literature help human beings see the world as it really is? Why have authoritarian regimes repeatedly feared books, and what responsibility does the writer bear when truth itself comes under political attack?
These are not abstract literary questions. Resistance appears amid an increasingly visible crisis of capitalist society in which governments manufacture narratives to justify war and repression, historical falsification becomes integrated into political life, universities and cultural institutions face financial and ideological pressures, and enormous corporations exercise unprecedented influence over the production and circulation of information. At the same time, the extraordinary development of artificial intelligence has provoked understandable anxiety among writers, artists and intellectuals about the future of creative labour and even the distinction between genuine intellectual creation and mechanically generated cultural material. In such circumstances, Manguel’s insistence on the written word as a means of discovering and preserving truth has undeniable value.
The difficulty arises when the argument moves from the defence of literature to the meaning of resistance itself. Manguel suggests that literature may ultimately amount to an affirmation, a continuing refusal to surrender before falsehood and barbarism, before arriving at the tentative proposition that perhaps this is enough. That hesitation is significant. If the statement means that literature cannot overthrow governments or substitute for political organisation, it is obviously true. No serious conception of artistic creation should demand that novels, poems and plays function as political manifestos. But if literature as moral affirmation is proposed as an adequate response to the social forces threatening culture and civilisation, then Manguel has arrived at the limits of the liberal conception of resistance. Literature can illuminate reality, but illumination is not transformation. It can preserve historical consciousness, but consciousness becomes historically decisive only when it enters into a relationship with social forces capable of acting upon it.
Why censors fear books
Manguel is right that censors fear books, but the more difficult question is why they fear them. Writing is not inherently subversive. Libraries contain defences of monarchy alongside celebrations of revolution, justifications of empire beside denunciations of colonial oppression, and reactionary works beside the greatest expressions of human emancipation. The censor does not fear paper and ink. What authoritarian governments fear is the possibility that ideas may articulate suppressed social experiences, preserve memories that official history attempts to obliterate, and give people concepts through which they can understand their circumstances. A book becomes politically dangerous when the truth it contains intersects with the experiences and aspirations of living human beings.
Dante provides an instructive example because the Divine Comedy is inseparable from the historical world in which it was created. Dante does not speak from some timeless cultural realm standing above society. He writes out of the intensely conflict-ridden civilisation of late medieval Italy, from the standpoint of an exile whose personal fate had been intertwined with the political convulsions of Florence. His poem achieves universality not by escaping historical specificity but through it. Dante names individuals, condemns political and ecclesiastical corruption, judges the powerful and places popes and politicians within his moral universe. The enduring power of the Commedia derives precisely from this extraordinary interpenetration of the personal, political, historical and universal.
The contemporary vocabulary of “resistance” frequently moves in the opposite direction. Resistance has become a characteristic term of liberal cultural discourse because it can accommodate almost any form of individual disapproval while leaving the social foundations of what is being resisted unexplored. One can resist by reading, writing, purchasing a particular book, attending an exhibition, making a film or declaring oneself opposed to authoritarianism. The crucial questions gradually disappear: resistance to what social forces, conducted by which social classes, and directed towards what historical objective? Once stripped of these questions, resistance ceases to describe a process through which society might actually be transformed and instead becomes an ethical posture. The individual proves that they have not inwardly submitted, while the conditions producing the catastrophe continue largely undisturbed.
Argentina and the social roots of repression
Manguel’s connection with Argentina makes these questions particularly significant. The savagery of the military dictatorship cannot adequately be remembered merely as an assault upon writers, books and intellectual freedom. The junta certainly censored literature, persecuted intellectuals and attempted to suppress cultural opposition, but this formed part of a far wider programme of social and political repression directed against workers, students, left-wing organisations and all those regarded as threatening the existing economic and political order. The burning of books cannot therefore be separated from the suppression of the people who might read them, distribute them and act upon their implications.
The great upheavals preceding the dictatorship demonstrate why this distinction matters. The Cordobazo of 1969 revealed the explosive potential of the Argentine working class and indicated the depth of the social crisis confronting the ruling elite. What the Argentine state feared was not literature conceived abstractly but the development of political consciousness among social forces capable of challenging the established order. Books could form part of that process because culture can preserve historical experience and provide language through which previously isolated experiences become understood collectively. The dictatorship therefore sought not simply to silence writers but to destroy the political and social environment in which radical ideas might gain mass influence.
Manguel’s later tenure as director of Argentina’s National Library also raises, without requiring any question about his personal sincerity, the broader relationship between cultural institutions and political power. Libraries, museums, universities and publishing houses cannot hover permanently above the economic conditions of the societies that sustain them. Political decisions within a specific economic system ultimately shape their resources, priorities, and accessibility. The defence of cultural institutions consequently cannot be separated indefinitely from questions concerning who possesses society’s wealth, how public resources are allocated and what cultural activities are considered socially necessary. A government can praise national culture while imposing economic policies that undermine the material conditions required for its flourishing. The contradiction is social, not personal.
Literature and objective reality
The strongest aspect of Manguel’s argument is the conviction that literature can enable readers to see reality more clearly. This proposition takes on particular importance after decades in which significant tendencies within academic and cultural thought questioned whether objective reality could be meaningfully represented at all. Postmodernism transformed historical truth into competing narratives, displaced the analysis of social structures in favour of discourse and increasingly treated claims to objective knowledge with suspicion. Whatever Manguel’s differences with Marxism, his insistence that literature participates in the discovery of truth opposes this intellectual retreat.
The great tradition of realism rested precisely upon the conviction that society possesses an objective character that art can penetrate. Balzac and Thomas Mann remain perhaps the classic demonstration. His own conscious political sympathies hardly made him a revolutionary. Yet the artistic seriousness with which he examined post-revolutionary French society compelled him to reproduce, with extraordinary insight, the social forces transforming it. Marx and Engels admired Balzac not because he supplied an approved political programme, but because his artistic honesty revealed the movement of French society with a power that exceeded his conscious political prejudices. Something similar can be said of Tolstoy’s relationship to Russian society, Dickens’s exposure of Victorian England, Theodore Dreiser’s treatment of American capitalism and Thomas Mann’s treatment of German society.
Their achievements demonstrate why Marxist criticism cannot be reduced to searching works of art for correct political opinions. The artist who begins with predetermined conclusions and manipulates characters to illustrate them is unlikely to produce significant art. Genuine realism demands that the artist remain sufficiently open to reality for characters, situations and contradictions to develop beyond preconceived ideological formulas. Artistic truth may consequently collide with the writer’s own stated beliefs. The deepest social significance of literature frequently emerges from precisely this conflict between what an artist consciously intends and what an honest confrontation with reality compels them to reveal.
Art is not a political manifesto.
This distinction is essential when considering the most obvious objection to a Marxist criticism of Resistance. Manguel’s defenders could reasonably argue that a meditative essay about literature should not be condemned for failing to supply a revolutionary programme it never intended to provide. They might add that affirmation has its own value: preserving memory under dictatorship, maintaining intellectual independence under censorship, and insisting on human solidarity when political life is saturated with cruelty are not trivial accomplishments. This objection has force, and any criticism that measures literature by its proximity to political programme would be reductive.
But this is not the issue. Marxism does not require every novelist to become a political organiser, every poet to formulate a programme or every playwright to transform characters into spokespeople for socialism. The disastrous experience of Stalinist “socialist realism” demonstrated where such prescriptions lead. Art cannot flourish when reality is subordinated to a bureaucratically predetermined conclusion. Characters become sociological categories, conflicts become predictable and the independent discovery through which serious artistic creation proceeds is replaced by propaganda. A Marxist approach worthy of the name must defend artistic freedom precisely because truth cannot be discovered by administrative instruction.
Manguel’s criticism is therefore not that Resistance fails to tell readers which political organisation to join. It is that the increasingly abstract conception of resistance within liberal culture separates moral opposition from the historical forces capable of overcoming the conditions being opposed. The writer bears witness, the reader retains an ethical consciousness, and civilisation somehow continues despite the destruction occurring around it. Resistance progressively becomes consolation. Marxism insists upon reconnecting culture with history without reducing the former to the latter. Art has its own forms and problems, but artists, readers, and cultural institutions nevertheless exist within a society structured by definite relations of property and class.
The Reader and the World, Albert Manguel, Aleksandr Voronsky and Art as the Cognition of Life
For Manguel, reading is never simply the mechanical decoding of words. Across his writings on books, libraries and literary culture, reading emerges as a means by which human beings organise experience, preserve memory and discover possibilities beyond the limits of their immediate circumstances. Yet the philosophical implications of this conception become clearer when placed beside the Marxist aesthetics of Aleksandr Voronsky. In Art as the Cognition of Life, Voronsky advances the remarkable proposition that art is not merely a reflection upon life but one of the means through which life itself becomes known.
The affinity between the two writers begins with their refusal to reduce literature to information. A summary of its contents cannot replace a novel because what literature communicates resides in the artistic organisation of experience itself. Characters, situations, images, rhythm and language enable the reader to perceive relationships that abstract propositions cannot reproduce. Literature matters because it enlarges the field of human experience.
But Voronsky gives this insight a more explicitly materialist foundation. Art has cognitive significance because an objective world exists and can be known. The artist does not simply construct an arbitrary reality out of language. Nor does the reader possess unlimited authority to manufacture whatever meaning they choose. Artist, work and reader confront the accumulated substance of social and natural existence.
This conception distinguishes Voronsky sharply from much of the theoretical thinking about literature that developed later in the twentieth century. If reality becomes merely discourse and the literary work an endlessly unstable network of signs, then literature’s claim to disclose anything beyond itself becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Voronsky’s aesthetics begins from exactly the opposite direction. Human consciousness arose within the material world and possesses the capacity, however imperfectly and historically conditioned, to understand that world. Art constitutes one particular form of this struggle for understanding.
Here Manguel’s lifelong defence of reading takes on broader significance. The library is not valuable simply because old books possess cultural prestige. It represents an extraordinary accumulation of encounters between human consciousness and historical experience. Each generation returns to these works not simply to commemorate the dead but because earlier artistic discoveries can suddenly illuminate circumstances that their creators could never have anticipated.
This helps explain why great literature repeatedly escapes the purposes institutions try to impose on it. Governments, markets, universities and publishing industries classify works, construct canons and transform cultural objects into commodities. Yet the experience contained within a powerful work cannot finally be reduced to its market price, institutional reputation or approved interpretation. The reader may encounter something disturbing precisely because literature reveals contradictions that conventional ideology conceals.
Voronsky’s argument also challenges the crude assumption that Marxist criticism demands politically obedient literature. The artistic value of a novel cannot be measured simply by whether its author professes progressive opinions. Reactionaries can perceive important aspects of social life, while writers possessing admirable political convictions can produce lifeless art. The decisive question is whether the artist has penetrated beneath appearances and discovered something truthful about human beings and their relations with one another.
This argument becomes especially important in an age when literature is increasingly subjected to the logic of commodification. Books are marketed through categories, algorithms, celebrity endorsements and demographic niches. Reading itself can become another measurable consumption habit. Against this environment, both Manguel and Voronsky, from very different intellectual traditions, insist upon something considerably more demanding: the encounter with literature changes the reader’s relationship with reality.
Yet Voronsky supplies the deeper explanation of why this should be possible. Literature matters because reality is richer than the ideological abstractions imposed upon it. Genuine artists discover contradictions, emotions and social relationships that they may not themselves completely understand theoretically. Their works can therefore contain truths exceeding their conscious intentions.
This also explains the continuing power of literature written under historical conditions radically different from our own. We do not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Dickens merely as documents belonging to vanished societies. Their works disclose relationships between individuals and society, aspiration and necessity, wealth and poverty, love and property, freedom and constraint. The historical world changes, but the artistic cognition embodied in such works becomes part of humanity’s accumulated consciousness.
The encounter between Manguel and Voronsky therefore points towards a defence of reading more radical than cultural nostalgia. Libraries matter not because civilisation requires temples dedicated to books, but because literature preserves something capitalism continually threatens to diminish: the possibility of sustained attention to human experience outside the immediate requirements of profit and utility.
To read seriously is consequently to engage with the world rather than retreat from it. Manguel reminds us of the inexhaustible relationship connecting books, memory and readers. Voronsky explains why that relationship reaches beyond the private pleasures of reading. Art is a means of cognition, an attempt to penetrate appearances and grasp something truthful about life. The defence of literature therefore becomes inseparable from the defence of humanity’s capacity to know the world and, ultimately, to change it.
Artificial intelligence and the social question
The question becomes particularly sharp in relation to artificial intelligence. Writers and artists have legitimate reasons to regard the development of AI with anxiety. Intellectual and creative workers confront the possibility that corporations will use technologies trained on enormous quantities of existing cultural material to reduce costs, eliminate employment, and transform creative production itself. The increasing capacity to manufacture images, texts, music and synthetic media also creates obvious problems concerning authenticity and the social status of creative work. But none of these developments can adequately be understood by opposing human creativity to technology as such.
The decisive issue is ownership. Artificial intelligence did not descend upon society from outside history. It represents the accumulated product of scientific discovery, technological development, social knowledge and the labour of countless human beings. The contradiction is that socially generated productive capacities become concentrated in the ownership and control of private corporations and wealthy investors. The same technology that might be used to reduce monotonous labour, expand access to knowledge, translate vast bodies of literature, assist scientific research and increase the cultural possibilities available to humanity can, within capitalism, instead be employed to eliminate employment, intensify surveillance, strengthen military systems and subordinate intellectual activity still further to profit.
Trotsky identified the essential contradiction long before the development of digital computation when he discussed technology in Culture and Socialism. Under capitalism, machinery becomes an instrument for intensifying the exploitation of labour, but humanity cannot emancipate itself by rejecting the machine. The productive forces created under capitalism simultaneously establish the material possibilities for overcoming scarcity, drudgery and cultural backwardness. The Marxist answer to technological development is therefore neither corporate celebration nor romantic repudiation. It asks which social class controls technology, what economic principles guide its development, and what human purposes its capacities serve.
AI and humanity’s collective culture
Artificial intelligence makes this contradiction unusually visible because the material many AI systems depend on demonstrates the inherently collective character of culture itself. No writer invents the language in which they write. No scientist independently creates the accumulated body of knowledge upon which discovery depends. No historian creates the archive. Every generation inherits an immense cultural and scientific legacy produced by innumerable previous generations, and every genuinely significant intellectual achievement, in turn, enters that developing collective inheritance.
Digital technology has vastly enlarged the technical possibilities for making this inherited culture available. Libraries, historical archives, scientific research and enormous quantities of educational material can potentially become accessible to populations across the planet on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Under rational social arrangements, AI could help organise and navigate that information, overcome linguistic boundaries, and extend access to intellectual resources far beyond the institutions where they have traditionally been concentrated. The genuinely revolutionary potential lies not in the fantasy that machines will replace human thought, but in technologies that could extend human capacity to think, learn, and create.
The obstacle is not technological but social. When accumulated human knowledge becomes privately appropriated, the contradictions surrounding AI become an expression of the contradiction between collective production and private ownership that Marx identified as foundational to capitalist society. A serious discussion of AI and culture therefore must go beyond the fear that the machine threatens the writer. It must ask who owns the machine and who controls access to the accumulated knowledge upon which it operates. Without that transition, cultural criticism risks treating the symptoms of technological change while leaving untouched the social structure determining how technology will be used.
Trevor Griffiths and the writer’s social orientation
The 2008 discussion between playwright Trevor Griffiths and WSWS arts editor David Walsh provides a useful contrast because it approaches the relationship between artistic work and politics historically rather than merely morally. Griffiths belonged to a generation shaped by the international radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when questions of Marxism, revolution, the working class and political power entered cultural life with an intensity that would become almost unimaginable during the succeeding decades. Writers did not suddenly develop more courageous personalities. Their cultural development occurred within a wider movement of millions of people whose struggles transformed the intellectual atmosphere.
The importance of this experience lies precisely in the connection between culture and social life. Radical writing did not develop simply because writers chose to “resist”. A wider historical movement expanded the possibilities available to culture and made questions that had previously appeared marginal suddenly immediate. The subsequent defeats and betrayals of the radicalisation did not leave cultural life unaffected either. The turn to the right, the attacks associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, the decline of the old labour organisations and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union contributed to a profound transformation of intellectual life. Confidence in collective social transformation retreated. Class increasingly disappeared from cultural discussion, while politics became reinterpreted through personal identity, language and individual experience.
“Resistance” fitted this changed intellectual climate remarkably well. Revolution implies a social force, a historical objective and a question of political power. Resistance does not necessarily require any of them. One can resist indefinitely without confronting how society is to be reconstructed. The word therefore captures both the sincerity and the political limits of much contemporary cultural opposition.
From class politics to moral protest
This transformation did not arise merely from incorrect theoretical choices. It followed major political defeats and social transformations. The defeats of working-class movements during the closing decades of the twentieth century strengthened the apparent dominance of capitalism. They encouraged the conception that fundamental social transformation had become impossible. Politics increasingly adjusted itself to what was presented as an unalterable market order. In this environment, opposition shifted from transformation to transgression, personal expression, and symbolic protest. The language changed accordingly. Liberation gave way to representation, revolution to resistance, social transformation to individual empowerment.
None of these terms is necessarily meaningless. People genuinely resist oppression, and defending democratic and cultural rights remains essential. The problem arises when defensive resistance becomes an entire conception of historical possibility. A political culture organised merely around perpetual resistance tacitly assumes that the forces being resisted will themselves remain permanent. The individual may refuse inward submission, but the structure producing oppression survives. What appears radical can consequently conceal a deeply pessimistic historical conception.
Manguel’s final “perhaps that is enough” unintentionally expresses this pessimism. Literature preserves what is humane while the surrounding world becomes increasingly inhuman. The library becomes a shelter from barbarism rather than one element within humanity’s struggle to abolish the social sources of barbarism. Such a conception contains dignity, but it also embodies resignation.
Literature must disturb
Great literature has never confined itself comfortably to affirmation. It affirms humanity frequently through merciless criticism of the actual conditions under which human beings live. Its power lies partly in its capacity to destabilise assumptions so deeply embedded in social existence that they appear natural. The novelist can make visible relations that everyday consciousness conceals; the playwright can expose the contradiction between what individuals say and what their behaviour reveals; poetry can give expressive form to needs and experiences that have not yet found an adequate political vocabulary. Literature thereby does what political analysis alone cannot accomplish.
This disturbing quality is essential. Chekhov’s observation in “Gooseberries” that behind every contented person there ought to stand someone with a hammer reminding him continually that unhappy people exist captures something fundamental about serious art. Kafka’s celebrated image of literature as an axe for the frozen sea within us expresses the same demand in another form. Art should not merely confirm our existing morality. It should penetrate the defences through which individuals reconcile themselves to intolerable circumstances.
The greatest writing therefore does not simply inform readers that injustice exists. Newspapers can do that. It transforms perception. It makes previously accepted relationships strange and forces readers to reconsider their own experience. This process need not produce an immediately identifiable political conclusion. But it has enormous intellectual potential because fundamental social change becomes possible only when people stop treating the existing organisation of life as inevitable.
The reader is also a social being.
Nevertheless, there is a danger in turning reading itself into resistance. Capitalism is remarkably capable of commodifying its own criticism. Revolutionary imagery becomes advertising, rebellious music becomes fashion, political radicalism becomes a publishing category, and resistance becomes a marketable identity. The existence of radical books therefore proves very little about the political health of a society. An economic system can tolerate an enormous quantity of private dissent so long as that dissent remains disconnected from collective action directed against the foundations of social power.
The reader, moreover, is never simply a reader. The person sitting with a novel is also a worker or employer, tenant or landlord, parent, student, pensioner or unemployed person. They occupy a concrete position in society and participate in relationships that extend far beyond the page. Reading can alter how individuals understand these relationships, but the movement from understanding to transformation requires another sphere of activity. At some point the reader closes the book and re-enters the world.
This does not diminish reading. It identifies where its greatest significance potentially lies. A book may articulate something experienced by thousands or millions of individuals separately and thereby help transform private experience into social understanding. Once individuals recognise that what appeared to be a private misfortune is produced by conditions shared with countless others, consciousness has already begun moving beyond the individual. Literature can contribute powerfully to that process. But collective understanding becomes historically transformative only through collective action.
Seeing the world as it really is
Manguel therefore raises a considerably larger problem than his own solution can contain when he asks whether literature enables humanity to see the world as it really is. To confront reality today means recognising that capitalism is not simply an economy within which occasional injustices occur. It is a historically developed system of social relations characterised fundamentally by private ownership of the productive forces, the exploitation of wage labour and competition between corporations and nation-states. War, inequality, austerity and cultural impoverishment cannot be understood comprehensively as separate moral failures because they all arise within this wider social structure.
The same applies to the conditions confronting literature itself. The difficulties facing writers, libraries, publishing, arts education and serious journalism are continually treated as discrete cultural problems. Yet behind them stands the allocation of social resources. A society capable of producing extraordinary quantities of wealth nevertheless claims that it cannot adequately fund libraries, schools, museums, orchestras, theatres and other institutions through which cultural life develops. Writers are urged to accommodate themselves to market demands while publishers operate increasingly according to commercial imperatives. The contradiction is not a lack of technological or material resources, but their organisation around private accumulation rather than social need.
To see the world as it really is consequently requires seeing cultural decline as an expression of a broader social crisis. The defence of literature ultimately confronts the same questions as the defence of every other field of human activity: who owns society’s resources, who determines how they are distributed, and whose interests does production serve?
The question of the working class
This brings the argument to the subject that liberal theories of resistance generally avoid: the working class. Marxism did not assign workers a revolutionary role because Marx had a sentimental preference for industrial labour. The working class’s revolutionary significance arises from its position within capitalist production. Capital increasingly organises production collectively across national boundaries while ownership remains concentrated privately. Workers therefore participate every day in a highly socialised system whose productive capacities contradict the private appropriation of the wealth they create.
Modern technological development has intensified this contradiction rather than removed it. The global systems underlying digital communication, artificial intelligence, logistics, finance and scientific research depend upon vast networks of collective labour. Technologies celebrated as autonomous creations of entrepreneurs are actually impossible without generations of publicly and privately employed scientists, programmers, engineers, teachers, technicians and countless other workers, alongside accumulated cultural and scientific knowledge inherited from the past.
For writers, this question is decisive because culture itself increasingly depends upon the same globally integrated technical infrastructure. The interests of the serious artist ultimately collide with the same monopolistic relations that confront workers elsewhere. Intellectual property, digital platforms, publishing corporations and AI systems cannot be considered independently of the ownership structures controlling them. The defence of culture therefore develops an objective connection with the broader struggle over control of society’s productive and intellectual resources.
Literature is not a substitute for politics.
To argue this is not to demand politically obedient literature. On the contrary, literature becomes artistically impoverished when converted into political instruction. A novel organised to demonstrate conclusions that the author already possesses ceases to discover reality and becomes illustration. The greatness of art lies partly in its unpredictability, its capacity to uncover contradictions that neither the artist nor the reader initially anticipated.
But acknowledging the independence of artistic creation does not require pretending that literature exists outside historical development. The artist’s task is not identical to that of a political party, yet both confront the same objective world. Serious art and revolutionary politics approach reality through different forms, methods and purposes, but neither can indefinitely avoid the fundamental contradictions of its historical epoch.
The question is therefore one of orientation rather than prescription. Does the writer look towards society and attempt to penetrate its contradictions, or retreat from society into the assertion of individual moral integrity? Does cultural opposition seek historical clarification, or does it construct an enclave within which humane values can survive while the external world becomes increasingly barbaric? At this level, Manguel’s conception of resistance becomes inadequate.
Giving the argument against this criticism its due
There remains a serious counterargument. Admirers of Manguel can reasonably insist that Resistance is a literary meditation rather than a work of political economy. They may argue that the demand for cultural affirmation itself possesses value when censorship, historical falsification and political demoralisation threaten intellectual independence. Montaigne did not need to formulate a revolutionary programme for his essays to enlarge human self-understanding, nor must every contemporary writer transform reflections upon books into an analysis of capitalist property relations. Literature has moral, imaginative and aesthetic capacities that cannot be reduced to its relationship with class struggle.
This warning against reductionism should be taken seriously. A mechanical Marxism that treats every poem or novel simply as an ideological document generated by class position would be incapable of explaining why works produced in remote historical circumstances continue to move readers centuries later. Human beings have emotional and intellectual experiences that cannot be reduced to economic categories. Love, mortality, memory, betrayal, loneliness and hope are genuine elements of human life, and literature’s exploration of them possesses its own legitimacy.
But recognising this does not invalidate historical materialism. The universal in art does not exist by eliminating the particular. Human emotions themselves are experienced within historically developed social forms. Love in feudal society is not socially identical to love in modern capitalism, even though both contain recognisably human experiences. Literature becomes universal not by escaping the historical world but by rendering particular human experiences so truthfully that people living in different circumstances can recognise themselves within them. Marxism at its best therefore enlarges rather than diminishes the understanding of artistic universality.
Beyond “Perhaps that is enough”
Manguel’s hesitant conclusion can now be reconsidered. Perhaps, he suggests, affirmation and continuing resistance are enough. But enough for what? Enough to preserve personal integrity? Certainly. Enough to maintain historical memory against those seeking to destroy it? Sometimes. Enough to produce great literature? Possibly, because artists have never required correct political theories as prerequisites for artistic achievement. But enough to confront the social processes threatening culture, democratic rights and human civilisation? No.
Books did not abolish slavery, overthrow feudalism or defeat fascism. Yet intellectual and artistic culture played enormous roles in the historical struggles through which people became conscious of these conditions and acted against them. The distinction is fundamental. The Enlightenment contributed to the intellectual preparation of bourgeois revolution because its criticism of inherited authority intersected with major changes in European society. Marxism acquired world-historical significance not simply because Marx wrote extraordinarily penetrating books, but because those works articulated the objective historical interests of a social force capitalism itself created.
Ideas become material forces when they enter into the consciousness of masses of people. Literature forms part of this process because it can transform perception long before political conclusions become fully articulated. It can reveal what society tries to hide, recover what official history seeks to forget, and show that apparently natural social relationships have histories and therefore can have endings.
Literature is not enough, but it is necessary.
The conclusion should therefore be neither the liberal celebration of literature as resistance nor a philistine dismissal of books as politically powerless. Literature is not enough, but it is necessary. Books constitute one of humanity’s greatest repositories of accumulated consciousness. Through them, individuals separated by centuries enter into conversation. The dead continue to participate in the living’s intellectual life. Historical experience survives the societies that created it, and readers encounter modes of human existence radically different from their own.
No socialist movement worthy of the name can regard this inheritance indifferently. The struggle for human liberation is inconceivable without defending and expanding culture because socialism is not simply a different mechanism for distributing goods. Its historical justification rests on creating conditions in which the productive, intellectual, and creative capacities of every human being can develop to a degree impossible in a society dominated by exploitation, economic insecurity, and social inequality.
Manguel is consequently right to defend literature against the forces seeking to diminish it. He is right to insist that books can challenge falsehood and enlarge perception. He is right to regard cultural memory as something worth preserving in an age increasingly characterised by historical amnesia. But the logic of his own questions points beyond the conclusion he offers. If literature teaches us to see the world as it really is, then eventually it must help us confront the historical character of that world. It must make visible not only suffering but the social relationships that reproduce suffering, not merely authoritarianism but the forces giving rise to it, not simply technological anxiety but the structures of ownership determining the purposes towards which technology is directed.
The writer cannot transform society through writing, and it would be disastrous for art to pretend otherwise. But the writer need not accept a permanent separation between cultural truth and social action. Literature reaches towards something greater than private consolation precisely when the truth it discovers becomes part of humanity’s consciousness of itself. At that point, the distinction between the library and the world does not disappear, but their relationship becomes clearer. The reader carries historical experience out of the book and back into society.
“Perhaps that is enough” expresses the honourable pessimism of an intellectual determined to preserve culture while uncertain that society itself can be transformed. The challenge confronting writers and readers in the twenty-first century requires a more ambitious perspective. Literature should not pretend to replace political struggle, but neither should it reconcile humanity to a permanent condition of resistance. Its highest function is not to reassure us that conscience survives. At the same time, the world deteriorates, but it deepens our understanding of that world, disturbs our accommodation to it, and enlarges our conception of what human beings might become.
Manguel asks whether society can be compelled to recognise the evidence of facts. History suggests that it can, but never through books alone. It requires human beings who have understood their circumstances, recognised their collective interests and become determined to act upon that understanding. Literature can profoundly help develop such consciousness. That is why the answer to Manguel should not be that literature is powerless. It is something more demanding: literature becomes historically powerful when the truths it reveals encounter a social force capable of acting upon them.
The task, then, is to move beyond resistance as permanent moral protest. The defence of culture must become inseparable from creating a society in which culture, science, and technology cease to be subordinated to private accumulation and become part of humanity’s common inheritance. Literature will not accomplish that transformation by itself. But the literature worthy of the coming struggles will undoubtedly help human beings understand why such a transformation is necessary.
Bibliography
Balzac, Honoré de. La Comédie humaine. Various editions.
Chekhov, Anton. “Gooseberries.” 1898.
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Various editions.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925.
The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.
The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.
It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.
Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.
The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society’s class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.
They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.
The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.
But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.
A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.
The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.
The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.
The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.
The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.
The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.
The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.
Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire’s demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.
The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.
More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society’s structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.
This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.
The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.
The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.
This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.
Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.
Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.
Chris Wickham’s death on October 9, 2026, at age 76 removes from intellectual life one of the most significant historians of the early Middle Ages produced in the postwar period. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, Wickham transformed the study of medieval Europe through a rigorous application of historical materialism, demonstrating that the social relations governing production, surplus extraction and class power remained indispensable to understanding the rise and decline of societies.
At a time when large sections of the historical profession abandoned such questions in favour of discourse analysis, identity politics and the increasingly subjective preoccupations of the “linguistic turn,” Wickham remained committed to explaining history through the material foundations of human life. His work restored peasants, landlords, taxation systems, trade networks and class relations to the centre of medieval history.
Born on May 18, 1950, in Rossett, Wales, Wickham studied at Oxford before beginning a long association with the University of Birmingham in 1977. He later held the prestigious Chichele Professorship of Medieval History at Oxford. Throughout his career, he combined meticulous empirical research with broad theoretical ambition, producing scholarship distinguished by an extraordinary command of documentary, archaeological and comparative evidence.
His early work focused on Italy, generating a series of influential studies that examined the social and economic structures of medieval life. Books such as Early Medieval Italy and The Mountains and the City revealed the complex interactions between peasant communities, aristocratic power and emerging forms of political authority. Even at this stage, Wickham displayed the qualities that would define his scholarship: a rejection of elite-centred narratives and a determination to uncover the social forces underlying political change.
Wickham’s most important intellectual intervention came with his 1984 essay, “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism.” For generations, Marxist historians had debated the origins of capitalism and the transition from feudalism to bourgeois society. Wickham instead drew attention to an earlier, equally decisive transformation: the collapse of the Roman world and the emergence of medieval social relations.
He argued that the essential distinction between the Roman Empire and its successors lay in the relationship between state taxation and landed property. Whereas Rome had rested upon a powerful tax-raising state apparatus, the post-Roman West increasingly became a world in which ruling classes derived their wealth directly from rents extracted from peasants. The shift from taxation to rent constituted one of the decisive social transformations in European history.
These arguments reached their fullest expression in his monumental Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (2005), a work widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements of modern medieval scholarship. At more than 900 pages and spanning territories from Ireland to Egypt, the book offered an extraordinary synthesis of decades of historical and archaeological research.
Against both nationalist myths and civilisational narratives, Wickham showed that the disappearance of Roman political authority produced sharply different outcomes in different regions. Social development depended not on culture or ethnicity but on concrete relations of class power, the strength of aristocracies, the survival of state structures, and the degree of autonomy retained by peasant producers.
Particularly significant was his analysis of what he termed the “peasant mode of production,” situations in which small cultivators retained substantial control over their own labour and surplus. Such arguments challenged simplistic narratives of uninterrupted aristocratic domination and demonstrated the complexity of post-Roman social development.
The book’s importance was recognised internationally through numerous awards, including both the Wolfson History Prize and the Deutscher Memorial Prize. The latter was especially appropriate. Few historians of his generation did more to demonstrate that Marxist categories remained essential tools for understanding long-term historical development.
Wickham belonged to the tradition of British Marxist historians associated with figures such as Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Yet he emerged at a time when both political reaction and intellectual retreat had severely weakened Marxism’s influence in academia.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 accelerated a wave of triumphalist claims regarding the “end of history” and the supposed death of Marxism. Within universities, social history increasingly gave way to cultural studies, postmodernism and various forms of identity-based analysis. Grand narratives of social transformation came under sustained attack.
Against these trends, Wickham continued to insist that modes of production, class relations and material interests remained essential explanatory categories. In doing so, he helped preserve and develop a tradition of historical inquiry that might otherwise have faced marginalisation.
At the same time, Wickham’s intellectual trajectory reflected the limitations of the broader current from which he emerged. As many academic Marxists associated with the postwar British left, he approached Marxism primarily as a method of historical analysis rather than as the theoretical foundation of a revolutionary political movement.
The social and political struggles of the contemporary working class occupied little place in his scholarly work. This separation between Marxist scholarship and socialist politics was not an individual failing. It reflected the broader influence of Stalinism, Labourism and various forms of academic radicalism that shaped much of the intellectual left during the second half of the twentieth century. Historical materialism survived as a sophisticated method of analysis, while its revolutionary implications were increasingly detached from contemporary political practice.
Nevertheless, Wickham’s achievements remain immense. His scholarship powerfully refuted every attempt to explain history through race, national character, religion, or culture alone. He repeatedly demonstrated that political institutions, beliefs, and identities could be understood only through their connection to underlying social and economic realities.
This aspect of his legacy matters especially when far-right movements seek to appropriate the medieval past for reactionary purposes. Across Europe and internationally, medieval history has been repeatedly distorted to legitimise myths of ethnic purity, national destiny and civilisational conflict. Wickham’s work provided a devastating intellectual antidote to such falsifications by revealing the medieval world as a complex and dynamic arena of social conflict, economic change and cultural interaction.
His death comes amid a deepening crisis of higher education. Universities throughout Britain and internationally are increasingly subordinated to market imperatives, corporate management structures and short-term financial calculations. Humanities departments have been closed, jobs eliminated and entire fields of scholarship threatened. The conditions that enabled decades-long projects of serious historical research are being systematically undermined.
Producing works such as Framing the Early Middle Ages required time, institutional support, and a commitment to scholarship that is increasingly incompatible with the demands of contemporary academia. The attack on universities is part of a broader assault on critical thought and historical understanding amid mounting social inequality and political instability.
Chris Wickham leaves behind a body of work that will continue to shape historical scholarship for generations. More than any individual book or argument, however, he leaves an example of what serious historical inquiry can achieve: an unrelenting effort to understand how human beings organised production, how ruling classes secured their power, and how social systems emerged, developed and ultimately passed away.
For historians, students and workers seeking to understand the origins and evolution of class society, his writings remain an invaluable resource. They stand as a lasting contribution to the materialist understanding of history and a reminder that the past can only be grasped through the study of the real social relations that have governed human life.
Selected Bibliography of Chris Wickham
Major Books
Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400–1000 (1981)
The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (1988)
Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (1994)
Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (2005)
Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (ed., 2007)
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400–1000 (2009)
The Medieval World (ed., 2009)
Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (2015)
Medieval Europe (2016)
Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (2019)
The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180 (2023)
Important Articles and Essays
“The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past & Present, no. 103 (1984), pp. 3–36.
“Problems of Comparing Rural Societies in Early Medieval Western Europe.”
“Marx, Sherlock Holmes and Late Roman Commerce.”
“The Uniqueness of the East.”
“Historical Materialism and Historical Sociology.”
Recommended Reading on Wickham’s Historical Method
Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005), Introduction and Conclusion.
Chris Wickham, “The Other Transition” (1984).
Chris Wickham (ed.), Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (2007).
Rodney Hilton (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976).
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974).
Guy Bois, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand (1992).
Frieze London, the annual meeting point of the global art market, is no neutral stage. Hedge-fund managers, oligarchs’ advisers, and celebrity collectors move through Regent’s Park, selecting luxury commodities for private vaults, freeports, and speculative portfolios. Organisers describe the fair as a meeting place for “global culture,” but in reality, it is one of the clearest expressions of art’s financialisation under late capitalism. Here, artistic labour is stripped of its social meaning and turned into an asset class, valued not for its insight or urgency but for the appetites of the ultra-rich. The fact that this year’s fair rewarded a work exposing the industrialised production of online intimacy is an irony so stark it borders on satire. Yet it also reveals what the contemporary art world is willing to acknowledge and what it refuses to confront.
The 2026 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award has gone to London-based artist Ella Fleck for her installation training material (aria), presented with LA gallery Ehrlich Steinberg in the fair’s Focus section. Fleck’s project draws on her undercover training as a “chatter” for an OnlyFans “parasite company”, a third-party agency that impersonates female creators and holds scripted conversations with subscribers. Often run transnationally by men, these agencies operate as outsourced intimacy factories. Their workers, frequently based in the Global South, perform scripted flirtation and emotional labour designed to maximise revenue. The “girl” a subscriber thinks he is messaging at 2 a.m. is more often than not a poorly paid shift worker following a productivity dashboard. It is a world of impersonation, alienation and relentless monetisation, where human connection becomes a revenue stream and loneliness a commodity.
Fleck’s research is serious, and her installation is one of the few works at Frieze to engage with the realities of life under contemporary capitalism. Visitors stand on a raised server-floor platform, where modular tiles and exposed cabling evoke the digital economy’s hidden infrastructure. Male voices performing chatter scripts reverberate through the structure, transforming the floor into a resonant chamber. Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during training, exposing the metrics, quotas and supervisory systems that govern this labour. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, reminding visitors that the desire being sold is manufactured. The installation’s strongest gesture is its insistence that visitors stand directly on the machinery of commodified intimacy, feeling the scripted voices vibrate beneath their feet. It effectively exposes a workplace usually concealed behind the fantasy of personal connection.
But the response to the work, and how it is framed, reveals the art establishment’s ideological boundaries. The Camden Art Centre jury praised the installation for making visible “the hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” These are safe, abstract formulations. They gesture toward critique while avoiding the specific social relations underlying the industry Fleck has investigated. Absent is any recognition of the workers themselves: who they are, what they are paid, and how their labour fits into the global chains of exploitation underpinning platform capitalism. The chatter economy is not merely a cultural phenomenon or a question of “desire”; it is a brutally efficient mechanism for extracting profit from both the poorly paid worker typing scripted flirtations and the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere. Fleck’s installation points to these realities, but the art world’s reception reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line.
Inside the machinery of commodified intimacy
The most compelling aspect of Fleck’s project is her immersion in what might be called the chatter economy: a hidden, industrialised sector of digital labour beneath the glossy marketing of “creator platforms.” Using a male alias, she trained as “Eliott,” learning the scripts, behavioural prompts and manipulative techniques used to extract money from isolated men seeking connection. The arrangement is brutally simple: men impersonate women, chat with other men and sell the illusion of intimacy. What is marketed as personal desire is actually a production line governed by metrics, quotas and managerial oversight. The chatter is not a romantic interlocutor but a worker performing emotional labour under conditions shaped entirely by profit.
This is the true subject of Fleck’s installation, and where the work is strongest. She does not present the chatter economy as a metaphor or cultural curiosity; she treats it as a workplace. The installation gives this system physical form, making visitors confront the infrastructure that enables such labour. Its raised server-floor platform with modular tiles, exposed cabling and vibration exciters evokes the hidden architecture of the digital economy. This is the kind of flooring found in data centres, call-centre facilities and server rooms: the literal ground on which contemporary exploitation rests. Standing on it, visitors feel male voices from scripted chatter reverberate through their feet. The fantasy of intimacy gives way to the physical sensation of labour.
Three monitors show a custom-coded manager’s dashboard, adapted from interfaces Fleck encountered during her training. It displays the metrics that shape the chatter’s day: response times, conversion rates, subscriber spending, and productivity targets. The dashboard isn’t an artistic invention; it reflects the real tools this industry uses to monitor and discipline workers. A pheromone-infused scent fills the booth, underscoring the manufactured nature of the desire being sold. Everything in the installation points to the same conclusion: intimacy has been industrialised, and the worker’s body reduced to scripts and metrics has been absorbed into a system designed to monetise loneliness.
The platform itself is the installation’s strongest element. It makes the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure tangible, revealing the labour beneath the fantasy. This is a workplace, not a boudoir call centre disguised as a love affair. Visitors stand not in a realm of desire, but amid the machinery of commodification. The voices vibrating through the floor are not whispers of seduction; they are echoes of wage labour. The installation’s power comes from this inversion: it collapses the distance between digital fantasy and the physical conditions that produce it.
Fleck’s decision to foreground the infrastructure is significant. Much contemporary art dealing with digital culture remains at the level of imagery, aesthetics or surface critique. Fleck instead directs attention to the material base: the servers, the scripts, the dashboards, the labour processes. She shows that the chatter economy is not a cultural phenomenon but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism. Workers performing these scripts are often based in the Global South, earning low wages, sometimes paid partly on commission. Their labour is outsourced emotional work, sold under the guise of intimacy, and governed by the same managerial logic that structures call centres, content moderation farms and other forms of digital piecework.
In this sense, Fleck’s installation is about more than deception or fantasy. It shows how human connection becomes a commodity and emotional labour is reduced to programmable tasks. It suggests that capitalism colonises even life’s most intimate aspects, turning affection, attention, and companionship into sources of revenue. The installation is most effective when it insists on this material reality and forces visitors to confront the machinery beneath the illusion.
What the jury praised and what it avoided
The Camden Art Centre jury praised Fleck’s installation for exposing “hidden architectures and technologies of online desire and commerce,” and for addressing “money, control, labour, manipulation and the power of images.” Such phrases are typical of contemporary curatorial discourse: safe, abstract and deliberately non-committal. They gesture toward critique without naming the social relations at stake. This allows the institution to appear engaged with labour and exploitation while avoiding confrontation with the actual conditions of the workers whose labour the piece makes visible. In this sense, the jury’s statement is not merely incomplete; it reflects the art world’s ideological limits.
It entirely fails to recognise the workers. The chatter economy is neither an aesthetic phenomenon nor a cultural metaphor; it is a workplace staffed by real people doing real labour under conditions of exploitation. Investigative reporting over the past several years has documented chatters in the Philippines and elsewhere in the global South working for low wages, sometimes with part of their pay tied to commission. Their work is outsourced call-centre labour presented as intimacy. They work night shifts, follow scripts, meet quotas, and are monitored by dashboards like those used in customer-service centres and content-moderation farms. Above them are agency owners, creators, and OnlyFans itself, whose billionaire owner takes a cut of every transaction. The chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a node in the global supply chain of platform capitalism.
At the bottom of this hierarchy are two exploited figures. First is the poorly paid chatter, typing scripted flirtations, whose work hides behind the illusion of personal connection. Second is the isolated man paying for companionship he cannot find elsewhere, whose loneliness the same system monetises. Each is exploited differently, but by the same system: the chatter’s labour is cheapened and concealed, while the subscriber’s emotional need is commodified and sold back to him. Both are victims of a social order that has turned human connection into a revenue stream.
The jury’s language dissolves these realities into a cloud of abstractions. “Labour” becomes a conceptual motif rather than a class relation. “Desire” becomes a cultural theme rather than a symptom of social breakdown. “Manipulation” becomes an aesthetic category rather than a description of how corporations profit from human vulnerability. This is no accident. The art world is comfortable with metaphors but allergic to material analysis. It can tolerate works that expose mechanisms, but not those that explain them. Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry, and the art world, dependent on the fortunes of the wealthy, is unwilling to do so.
The chatter economy directly expresses the social crisis created by decades of neoliberal restructuring: insecure work, the collapse of public life, atomisation, and the erosion of community. The men who pay for scripted companionship are not simply indulging in “heterosexual male fantasy,” as the fair’s own description suggests. They are responding to lives shaped by austerity, precarity, and social isolation. Their loneliness is not a psychological quirk but a social fact. The chatter’s labour is not merely a cultural phenomenon; it is exploitation. Yet the art world frames both as matters of “desire,” “images,” and “online commerce,” as though the problem were representation rather than political economy.
This abstraction serves a purpose: it allows institutions like Frieze and Camden Art Centre to acknowledge exploitation without implicating themselves in the system that produces it. IMG, a global entertainment corporation, owns Frieze, and it sells luxury goods to the wealthy. It is structurally incapable of addressing the class relations underpinning the chatter economy, because those same relations underpin the art market itself. Speaking plainly about exploitation in one sector would invite questions about exploitation in another. Better, then, to speak in abstractions to praise works for revealing “hidden architectures” while leaving the owners of those architectures unnamed.
Fleck’s installation points to the realities the jury avoids. It reveals the machinery beneath the fantasy. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.
Gender as mask, not engine
Frieze’s own description presents Fleck’s installation as an investigation of “heterosexual male fantasies.” This is a familiar move: reducing a social phenomenon to psychology, then reducing psychology to gender. It is the standard reflex of contemporary cultural institutions faced with exploitation they cannot name. Gender becomes a convenient interpretive screen, safe, fashionable, and politically unthreatening. But gender is not the engine of this industry; it is the costume. The engine is the commodification of human need.
The chatter economy is not meaningfully driven by “fantasy.” Capital’s logic drives it: the imperative to extract profit from every human vulnerability, every emotional deficit, and every form of isolation produced by a society organised around competition and precarity. Fantasy is merely the interface; the machinery beneath it is economic.
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism feels almost too literal here. In the chatter economy, what appears to be a relationship between a subscriber and a woman who doesn’t exist is really a relationship between a customer and a wage worker, mediated by a corporation and concealed by software. The “girl” is a commodity, the “relationship” a transaction, and the “desire” a revenue stream. The human connection the subscriber believes he is buying is, in fact, a relation between things: a script, a dashboard, and a payment processor. Fleck’s installation brilliantly places the visitor directly on the infrastructure that makes this deception possible. But the work falters when it treats the problem as one of male fantasy rather than capitalist social relations.
The art world refuses to ask the question it must: why so many men, often young and precariously situated, spend money they do not have on scripted companionship. The answer is not some fixed quality of “heterosexual male fantasy.” It lies in the conditions of life under late capitalism: insecure work, the erosion of community life, atomisation, and loneliness on a mass scale. The chatter economy is no cultural aberration; it is a symptom of a society where millions live without stable relationships, public spaces, time, or security. Men who pay for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk; they are responding to a social crisis.
An industry that profits from loneliness depends on a society that produces it. The chatter economy commercialises a condition shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring: the destruction of social housing, the erosion of welfare, the casualisation of labour, and the collapse of collective institutions. Loneliness is not an individual failing, but a structural outcome, and the chatter economy monetises it.
Yet Frieze’s framing reduces all of this to “male fantasy,” as if the problem were representation rather than political economy. This reduction serves a clear ideological function: it shifts attention from the class relations structuring the industry to individual behaviour, turns exploitation into psychology, and recasts a social crisis as a cultural trope. It lets the institution appear critical while avoiding any confrontation with the system that produces both the chatter’s labour and the subscriber’s isolation.
This marks the ideological limit of contemporary art discourse. It can acknowledge desire, fantasy, and representation, but not class. It can discuss gender, but not exploitation. It can gesture toward “hidden architectures,” yet it cannot name their owners. Fleck’s installation points to the realities the fair’s framing avoids, revealing the machinery beneath the illusion. But the art world’s response shows how far it will go and where it draws the line.
The art fair as ideological filter
The setting matters. Frieze is not an innocent backdrop but an active ideological filter. IMG, a global entertainment and sports conglomerate, owns the fair, and its business model depends on circulating luxury goods to the wealthy. Its purpose is not cultural enrichment but capital accumulation. In this context, the presentation and celebration of a work exposing the commodification of intimacy becomes a kind of theatre: a momentary glimpse of exploitation staged inside an event devoted to commodifying artistic labour itself. The contradiction is glaring, yet the fair’s framing neutralises it with remarkable efficiency.
The Camden Art Centre jury notes, blandly, that Fleck’s installation is presented in the “particular context” of an international art fair. This phrase is a masterpiece of evasion. It acknowledges the setting only to deflate its significance immediately. The “particular context” is not particular at all; it is the structural condition of the work’s reception. But the jury cannot explore that context. Doing so would require acknowledging that the art world itself is part of the same system of extraction, speculation, and class power that produces the chatter economy Fleck has investigated. The chatter economy monetises loneliness; the art fair monetises culture. Both depend on the same class hierarchy, the same concentration of wealth, the same global circuits of capital.
This is the ideological limit of “critical” art under capitalism. It may expose mechanisms, but it must not explain them. Exposure is safe; explanation is dangerous. Exposure can be absorbed into the fair’s marketing language: “hidden architectures,” “online desire,” “the power of images.” Explanation would require naming the class relations that structure the industry: the billionaire owners, the speculative collectors, the corporate sponsors, the financial institutions that treat art as a hedge against inflation. It would require acknowledging that the fair’s own existence depends on the fortunes of the rich, and that the art world’s economic base is inseparable from the inequalities it occasionally gestures toward.
The chatter economy and the art market are not parallel phenomena; they express the same social order. In both, labour is hidden, value is extracted, and human need is commodified. The chatter’s emotional labour is concealed behind the fantasy of intimacy; the artist’s intellectual labour is concealed behind the glamour of the fair. The subscriber pays for companionship he cannot find elsewhere; the collector pays for cultural capital he cannot produce. Corporations mediate both transactions and profit from individuals’ alienation in a society organised around competition and scarcity.
Yet the fair’s framing insists on treating Fleck’s work as a cultural commentary rather than a political one. It reduces exploitation to aesthetics, class relations to “themes,” and structural inequality to “context.” This is not simply a failure of analysis; it is a structural necessity. The art world cannot name the system that sustains it. It cannot acknowledge that the same forces driving workers in the Philippines to perform scripted intimacy for low wages also drive artists to produce market‑friendly work for speculative buyers. It cannot admit that the same social conditions that make art fairs the preserve of the ultra-rich also produce the loneliness monetised by OnlyFans.
Fleck’s installation, by exposing the machinery beneath the fantasy, points toward these realities. But the institution’s response reveals how far it will go and where it draws the line. The fair can tolerate critique, but only if it remains abstract. It can reward exposure, but only if it stops short of explanation. It can acknowledge exploitation, but only if it does not name the exploiters.
Where Fleck’s work points and where it stops
None of this is meant as a criticism of Fleck for exhibiting at Frieze. Artists have to work within existing institutions, not those they wish existed. The contemporary art world offers few places for serious engagement with the realities of exploitation, and fewer still where such work can be funded, shown, and discussed. Fleck’s willingness to enter a squalid corner of the digital economy, rather than theorising about it from a safe distance, is admirable. Much contemporary art is contentless: formal games, lifestyle branding, or gestures of political “concern” that vanish on contact with reality. Fleck’s work has a genuine subject, grounded in research and lived experience. It is rare to see an artist spend time inside the machinery of exploitation rather than merely depict its surface.
But the installation stops at exposure. It reveals the machinery beneath our feet without showing the system that built it. It lays bare the cabling and pipework, but not the ownership and exploitation that make them profitable. It gestures toward class, then retreats into gender. It identifies alienation without tracing its roots. The chatter economy is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a symptom of a broader social order that has commodified every human need and hollowed out every form of collective life. Exposing the mechanism without analysing the system leaves viewers with discomfort, but not understanding.
This limitation is not personal; it reflects the pressures on artists working within institutions whose economic base depends on the very class whose power they might otherwise critique. The art world can tolerate works that reveal exploitation, but only if they do not name the exploiters. It can reward exposure, but not explanation; acknowledge alienation, but not the social relations that produce it. Fleck’s installation pushes against these boundaries, but does not break them. It points beyond itself, toward questions the art world is structurally unwilling to confront.
The next stepone Fleck is well positioned to take in her upcoming solo exhibition at Camden Art Centreis to follow these threads further: from the infrastructure to the people who inhabit it; to the chatters in the global South, whose labour is hidden behind the fantasy of intimacy; to the agency owners who profit from their work; to the platform’s billionaire class, whose wealth is built on monetising loneliness; and to the social conditions that produce mass loneliness in the first place: precarious employment, collapsing public services, atomised communities, and decades of austerity that have stripped life of stability and connection.
Such an approach would not simply expose a mechanism; it would analyse a system. It would show that the chatter economy is not a cultural curiosity but a direct expression of the crisis of social reproduction under late capitalism. It would reveal that men paying for companionship are not indulging a psychological quirk but responding to life conditions shaped by insecurity and isolation. It would also show that the exploitation of chatters and the alienation of subscribers are two sides of the same social order.
This would be work worth seeing. It would move beyond the art world’s comfort zone of abstraction and metaphor to confront the class relations shaping both the digital economy and the cultural institutions that claim to critique it. Fleck has already shown she can uncover the hidden sites of contemporary exploitation. The challenge now is to follow those threads to their source: the system that produces them, and the possibility of a world where human connection is not a commodity.
